My sister Antonia has Down Syndrome.

Growing up, that was never something hard, or sad, or something we had to come to terms with. It was simply our normal, the way our family was 🫶🏼
The disability of my sister was always part of my life. It just never occurred to me as something connected to my work or to the field I was studying.

That changed in one of the first classes of my Master's program.
We were curating an exhibition with the CAM–Gulbenkian collection at UCP. Our professor, Luisa Santos, looked at our initial selection and asked a simple question: had we thought about the diversity of the artists we'd chosen? Up to that point, our criteria had been purely aesthetic.

What followed was a long conversation: about women in the arts, about artists from different cultural backgrounds, about LGBTQ+ representation, about who gets a chance to be seen. At the end of that class, I realized something: we hadn't mentioned persons with disabilities once. And neither had I.

That realization stayed with me. Quietly, in the background, for the rest of the semester. I started looking for artists with disabilities, for any mention of the topic in museums, in the field. I didn't find much. And if I'm honest, I didn't dig deeper either—not yet.

Then it came time to choose a thesis topic. And there was Antonia, who had been right there the entire time. Antonia is one of the most creative, capable, and genuine people I know. I've always been aware of the barriers people with disabilities face in our society. But it took a comment in a curatorial class to make me realize how present that gap was in the exact field I was studying.

That's how I arrived at my research: through a gap that had been right in front of me, concerning someone I love.

This is the personal starting point behind everything I'll be sharing here about my research over the coming weeks.