We Want to Live in This Colorful Lisbon Artist’s Residency
Photo by Francisco Nogueira
Stephane Mulliez can imagine the future before it appears. As a visual artist, she has willed forms and shades to pop and fade on materials of her choosing, pulling them from her mind and onto something others could experience for themselves. So, when she had an idea to open an artist’s residency known as La Junqueira, it was as if this process had expanded: Stephane could picture the end result, but had yet to find the right canvas.
That was in 2012, and all she knew at the time was that the residency needed to be based in Lisbon. “Lisbon has a lot of great Portuguese and international artists who I wanted to help grow,” she says. Stephane spent two years looking for the right location until she came across an 18th-century building in the variegated neighborhood of Belém—which happened to be serendipitously close to museums. “It was still operating as a small primary school when I discovered it,” she says. “The balanced layout made it so that it only required a surface restoration.”
