AN EVENING WITH SIMONA CHIUSOLO
SIMONA CHIUSOLO is an Italian writer, performer, and interdisciplinary artist working across poetry, movement, sound, and performance who did a residency at LABIRINTO ECLÉTICO from August to October 2026. To mark the end of her residency, we organized an intimate evening of conversation, literature, food, wine, and music. Our neighbour, LUIS LEAL, a writer and poet in his own right who was nominated for the Prémios Alentejo 2026, sat down with Simona for a fireside chat about her work, her time at LABIRINTO ECLÉTICO, and the experience of living and creating in Elvas. Simona also shared a poem written during her residency and inspired by Elvas titled “The Sound of Silence” which was read in its original language (Spanish) alongside a Portuguese translation.
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ABOUT SIMONA
With a background in Performing Arts from Sapienza University and the National Academy of Dance in Rome, and further studies in Philosophy, Simona’s work is driven by a continuous search for knowledge, freedom, and forms of embodied understanding. Her artistic practice emerges through improvisation as a process of remembering. Rather than beginning with fixed concepts, she follows intuition, allowing words, gestures, sounds, and movements to reveal their own internal logic. Working across disciplines, she explores the porous boundaries between language, body, and music, seeking moments in which personal experience resonates with broader human questions. Alongside her artistic practice, Simona has worked as a journalist for Live Performing & Arts, writing on gender, discrimination, and racism in the arts. Her article Pearl Primus: Black Dance Matters was a finalist for the Dance Rewrite Award, and one of her short novels was shortlisted for the Varnish Prize Literary Journal. In 2026, she published her first poetry collection, Nocturnes. Having lived a nomadic life across disciplines, places, and practices, Simona understands creativity as a space of continual transformation—where study, observation, literature, conversation, and lived experience reorganize themselves into artistic form. Website: https://tinyurl.com/SIMONACHIUSOLO
ABOUT LUIS
Luis Leal is a Portuguese-Spanish writer, columnist, poet, and translator. Born in Évora (Portugal) currently based in Badajoz (Spain), he lives and writes within the borderland known as la Raya, understanding the border not as a line of separation, but as a space of coexistence, movement, shared belonging, thought & encounter. His work, often bilingual, moves between chronicle, essay, poetry, aphorism, and philosophical reflection, with a sustained attention to everyday life, language, and both physical and human landscapes. In his writing, thought naturally coexists with doubt and humour, understood as the quiet self-awareness of an ego that refuses solemnity. A teacher of Portuguese in Spain, he has spent more than two decades engaged in cultural mediation, literary translation, and cross-border cooperation, while contributing regularly to cultural and media outlets in both Portugal and Spain. Committed to a humanist and ecological vision of the world, his writing proposes an ethics of care, memory, lived territory, and human connection. His work traces this personal and literary journey across languages, lands, and ways of inhabiting the world.
Books: https://acoureladoalentejo.com/publicacoes/ Blog: Senderos da Mão Esquerda Facebook Instagram
RESIDENCY SOCIALS
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/labirinto.ecletico/ Facebook: https://web.facebook.com/labirinto.ecletico/
