Micaela Zua

"Micaela Zua’s analog collages are intimate in scale, minimalist in form, and poetic in intent. Working with archival photographs - often of African communities - she reclaims and reconfigures fragments of memory. Faces are partially obscured, not to erase, but to protect. Her gestures are tender, suggesting that there is more to be felt than seen, more to be remembered than revealed.

Her work inhabits the delicate tension between presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, body and trace. In every composition, Zua invites the viewer into a slower way of seeing - one shaped by silence, subtlety, and the dignity of restraint. Through what is hidden or interrupted, new meanings begin to emerge, softly but decisively."

MEET

Micaela Zua

Micaela Zua (b. 1984, Portugal) is an analog collage artist with Angolan heritage. Her artistic journey began at the Escola Avelar Brotero in Coimbra, where she studied the visual arts and discovered that drawing was not her language. It was in the quiet ritual of cutting and composing that she found her true voice.

Self-taught and intuitively driven, Zua has developed a practice rooted in detail and restraint. Through delicate gestures of subtraction and reassembly, she crafts a visual language shaped by slowness, reflection, and the search for essence.

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