Arraiolos
Arraiolos is a quiet town of white and blue houses in the Alentejo, 120 km from Lisbon and 20 km from Évora, surrounded by plains, oak groves and olive groves.
The town is known for its circular castle and its hand-embroidered wool rugs, a craft that dates back to the Middle Ages.
Arraiolos is a small but very practical town, with supermarkets, pharmacies, a museum, a public pool, a library and sports facilities, all within walking distance, which makes everyday life easy for artists in residence.
In his book Arraiolos revisitado a preto e branco, José Borges describes the house: "On the town's noblest street, Rua Melo Mexia, stands this family's manor house, with an elegant late-18th-century façade, much improved by João de Melo Mexia, heir to the Arraiolos entailed estate, to receive King Pedro V there in 1860."
Team
Mercedes Vidal-Abarca
Co-founder and Director
Mercedes Vidal-Abarca (Vitoria, Spain, 1980) is an artistic director and curator. In 2015 she co-founded Córtex Frontal in Arraiolos, where she directs the residency programme and is responsible for curating, production and management, with projects centred on the relationship between contemporary creation and heritage. She curated the exhibitions Wireless (2023), Gémeos Falsos (2023), A Raia (2024), Bico (2025) and Última Ceia (2025), among others. She co-directs Hypertextile, Bienal de Arte, whose first edition takes place in 2027 as part of Évora 2027, European Capital of Culture. She studied drawing and painting at the SNBA and at Ar.Co and holds master's degrees in Applied Linguistics and in Educational Psychology. She has lived in Portugal since 2008.
Nuno Félix da Costa
Co-founder
Nuno Félix da Costa (Lisbon, 1950) is a psychiatrist, artist and poet. Active since the 1980s, his practice brings together photography, painting and other forms of intervention on the image, and explores questions of representation, memory and the poetic construction of the real. He has published several photography books, including Retratos de Hábito (1983), Portulíndia (2009), Salão Lisboa (2020), O Mundo Mesmo (2021) and Portugal era assim (2024). He has exhibited regularly since 1983 and his work is held in collections such as the Centro Português de Fotografia and the Coleção Nacional de Fotografia. In 2025 he presented the exhibition O Cão do Filósofo, curated by Adelaide Duarte, at Espaço MIRA, Porto.
Diogo Ramalho
Curator
Diogo Ramalho (Porto, 1983) is an architect, curator, designer and visual artist. He holds a degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto and a master's degree in Communication Design and New Media from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, and lived in Porto, Rome and New York before moving to Lisbon in 2011. In 2022 he founded Galeria Plato, in Évora and Porto, dedicated to contemporary art. As an independent curator, he presents exhibitions at Plato and in other venues in Portugal and abroad. He is the curator of the Córtex Frontal residency programme and co-directs the first edition of Hypertextile, Bienal de Arte.
Janis Dellarte
Production
Janis Dellarte (Lisbon, 1989) studied Fine Arts in Madrid and, in London, completed a degree in Textiles & Surface Design and a master's in Knitted Textiles at the Royal College of Art. She works from Portuguese textile traditions, bringing textiles into sculpture, drawing, performance, installation, collage, set design and costume, and creates with waste. She works as a production assistant at Córtex Frontal.
