Paula König is a painter, researcher, and educator based in Lisbon. Recently, she has been exploring traditional systems of collective land and water use in northern Portugal – a region now threatened by one of the largest proposed lithium mining projects in Europe. After traveling on several boats across different parts of the Atlantic, including a voyage to the High Arctic, she became interested in radical silence, as well as in the ongoing practices of maintenance and collective effort required to keep a vessel afloat – an experience that amplifies the question of how to attune and respond more deeply to the elements and to a planetary ecosystem that is, in many ways, “at sea.”

Through a non-extractive approach grounded in observation, exchange, and research, she works with (audio-)visual material and, at times, with collective and participatory projects. Her practice merges various techniques from scientific approaches to poetic gestures, searching for situated (hi)stories often embedded in critical perspectives on Western extractivism.