for us, by us.

Jesualdo Lopes is a Lisbon-born London-based multidisciplinary artist of Bissau-Guinean heritage whose journey has led him to become a versatile force in the realms of events, community activism, and film.

In 2021, Jesualdo established The Blacker The Berry Project, a collective championing Black LGBTQ+ artists across the globe through creative intervention such as exhibitions, club nights, workshops, and residencies. Since then, the collective has made a significant impact through its policies, having pioneered The Blacker The Moses, an exclusive retreat for Black working class creatives in collaboration with the family-run yoga facility Vale de Moses in the Portuguese mountains, as well as the country’s first known Safer Spaces Policy and Black Pride this year.

In addition to his work, Jesualdo is the Events and Outreach at the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre. His enthusiasm for creating safe, intergenerational, and intersectional spaces within the LGBTQ+ community is a testament to his ongoing commitment to making a difference and fostering inclusivity.

DON’T CALL ME TAKO is a DJ & Producer who draws on their Lusophone and British roots to explore and blend Black Electronic Dance Music’s evolution and similarities between cultures.

You may also know them as Music Lead at The Blacker The Berry Project, a Black queer-led multidisciplinary arts collective championing artists in the Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, as well as Latin and South America!

With features at Complex UK and No Signal Radio (Mothaland)… From City Splash, to UK Black Pride, and their first sold-out event: DON'T CALL ME TAKO presents Pixelated, an electronic sensory experience and record label – DCMT has played at renowned venues like Tate, Fabric, Ministry of Sound, Outracena, Village Underground Lisboa, EartH, Corsica Studios and many more.

Herlander is rewriting the rules of the popular musical standard, with a sound that borders on antipop and dives into a genreless pool. His songs bring together voices that harmonise with one another and distinct sounds that occupy the same space, in a coexistence that is both challenging and fluid. His music resists labels and draws strength precisely from its singularity.

Born in Seixal, Herlander released his first experimental EP in 2018, created in London where he lived, and since then has been exploring new ways of crossing sound, performance, and identity. A composer for theatre and installations, he has collaborated with various artists, including Ana Moura, Extrazen, and Odete, steadily establishing himself as an essential figure in the vanguard of Portuguese music.

El is an artist and non-academic researcher whose work dialogues from the lens of otherness, in order to trace permeable states of commonality and communion in our universal existence.

From photographic series to art installations with poetry, performative sound work with melodic soundscapes and written journals, visual archiving of marginalised subcultures and thought based workshops, the work exists to open our hearts to life.

With reverence for invisible and unspoken truths, El relies on live archival, and audio visual languages to hold a moment of recognition for those often censured and erased.

Eloïse Grace Winter is a culture-translating artist of Barbadian and English descent, raised in the Portuguese countryside, whose practice weaves together jewellery, linguistics, illustration, and collective conviviality. Through their work, they seek to translate and invite the magic of the natural and the spiritual into the everyday present, through adornment and collective care.

In 2022, they founded their jewellery studio and share its creations online through the space e.lu.iz on Instagram. Their interest in social and artistic practices motivates the creation, curation, and facilitation of various community projects, forest retreats, events, exhibitions, and creative directions.

Since 2021, they have been working with The Blacker the Berry Project, where they are the first and current Head of Safer Spaces, and are also a resident artist and co-curator of the Vale de Moses retreat in the Portuguese countryside, developing projects and programmes that contribute to local cultural and artistic growth.

Born in Angola in 1998, Rafael de Oliveira aka Oxyretronave describes himself as an afrofuturist, multidisciplinary visual artist of the diaspora, expressing his vision of the world through photography, and using “image manipulation to create new visual perspectives and engage with humanity. At the age of six, he picked up a camera and began to photograph anything that caught his attention.

In 2016, they moved to motion pictures, and stepped from behind the lens to in front of it, as an actor in the short film A Terceira Metade (The Third Half), and for this work he received a nomination for Best Actor in Short Film - National Competition. They studied Cinema and Television at Lisbon’s Escola de Tecnologias, Inovação e Criação (ETIC) from 2018 to 2020, specialising in videoclips and documentary film.

Most recently, Rafael has exhibited as part of the projects From A Distance Calling (2021) and Our (Spatial) Stories Live in Performative Futures (2022) at HANGAR (Centro de Investigação Artistica), as well as partake the curatorial team of Julianknxx’s Chorus in Rememory of Flight exhibition at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, in Lisbon.

(tsunami) Tânia Miranda de Carvalho is a Portuguese actor, performer, host and curator of Angolan and Bissau-Guinean descent, based in London.

Her main practices include acting and movement/dance performance as well as crowd engagement, cultural curation and creative writing. Tânia has work experience in workshop facilitation, event hosting and curation, and stage performance. Credits include Dreamland, V&A Museum, TATE Britain, Outernet London, The Lower Third, EartH, City Splash Festival, Rich Mix, Omnibus Theatre, and many more.

Graduated in BA Theatre Arts from Middlesex University, Miranda de Carvalho has trained in acting, physical theatre and playwriting. She is currently an Associate Artist at state of the [art] collective, UK Producer at The Blacker The Berry Project, and Host at Chocolate Kizomba.