On October 17, 2025, the program 90 Seconds of Science aired an interview with Professor and Lab2PT/IN2PAST Integrated Researcher Susana Gaudêncio about the exhibition Covas and the End of the World inspired by the extractivist history of the village of Covas and the lives and activism of local women in producing artistic objects.

“What guided my interest in this territory was its entire history of extractivist policies, which I discovered in 2022, when I went on my first mission there, invited by the Cerveira Art Biennial Foundation, as part of an artistic residency,” she says.

 

The Covas territory has a history of extractive policies and technological exploitation of geological and water resources, such as gold mining in Roman times, the construction of the country’s second hydroelectric plant (1910), the extraction of tungsten and tungsten (1949-1984), and more recently, attempts to prospect for lithium (2020-2023).
This initiative uses prospecting as a positive metaphor to explore the place in a performative way, through walking, and in this process, collaborate with its community, from those representing local power to those involved in artistic processes and projects that catalyze local development and sustainability, such as the one that promotes activist struggle in the countryside.

 

“I had already heard reports in the media about an informal group of women, the Mulheres da Serra, who had come together to defend the territory from the possibility of lithium extraction. Therefore, they were still in the lithium prospecting period, and I was curious to learn more about their strategies and how they organized themselves,” she reveals.
The methodology of this project consisted of going to the territory and trying to contact these women, but also local authorities, especially the parish council presidents, and amateur historians, who have photographic records of the history of Covas and the history of wolfram and tungsten exploration, and the lithium “threat.”
From this collection, these conversations, and these walks, the idea is to try to produce artistic objects that can be made from objects the researcher finds on site during her walks, photographs, drawings, interviews, among others.
Covas is a small village in the Serra d’Arga in the municipality of Vila Nova de Cerveira.

 

Available here: https://www.90segundosdeciencia.pt/episodes/ep-2095-susana-gaudencio/