Artist and researcher. Non-binary lesbian.

Ritó Natálio’s practice spans the fields of performance, anthropology, and ecology, often in dialogue with queer and Indigenous communities and through experimental methodologies of artistic research, interdisciplinary curatorial strategies, and public forms of knowledge dissemination.

A central aspect of their work involves text-based performances that bridge artistic and academic contexts, exploring how performance can function as a space for study and engagement with questions of territory, decolonial ecology, transitional justice, and critical transmission. Their contextual and multidisciplinary practice moves fluidly across different formats — from stage to kitchen, from book to screen — and frequently extends into workshops combining somatic practices, writing, and proposals for radical pedagogy.

Ritó Natálio has created several lecture-performances on the relationship between language and geology, presented internationally in artistic venues, theatres, and academic contexts: “Anthroposcenes” (2017), with João dos Santos Martins, “Geophagy” (2018), and “Fossil” (2020). In 2023, they created “Spillovers”, a fabled and collective reinterpretation of “Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary” (1976) — the iconic work of lesbian feminism by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig — adapted into a performance, film (Casa Comum Award at the 10th Queer Porto), and book. In 2025, they premiered “Rite of Transition”, a co-production with the National Theatre D. Maria II developed within the framework of the European project STAGES.

Ritó holds a PhD in Artistic Studies and Anthropology with an FCT scholarship, an MA in Clinical Psychology (PUC–São Paulo), and a degree in Choreographic Arts (University Paris VIII). They have published academic articles, artists’ texts, and independent publications connected to their research. In 2019, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Ritó co-organised an Indigenous film programme with Indigenous filmmakers and curators, together with a collective platform of researchers and activists from Portugal, including Ailton Krenak. Since 2020, they have coordinated Terra Batida (terrabatida.org), a network of people, practices, and forms of knowledge engaged in resisting ecological violence and politics of abandonment. Since 2023, they have collaborated with least — an arts and ecology laboratory based in Geneva — on the project “Peau Pierre” (“Stone Skin”), a long-term project focused on eco-queer pedagogies developed in co-creation with local associations. They also coordinated two four-month laboratories with Amador Alina Folini for young people aged 18 to 25, within the framework of the “Imagine” project of the Educational Service of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2022–23). Ritó is an associate artist of Associação Parasita, a structure funded by the Portuguese Republic — Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport / Directorate-General for the Arts between 2023–2026.

I am interested in the porous difference between people and things, and in the limits between language as a cut (fixing norms and identities) and language as flow, non-comparative. It is possible to understand, within the ‘abstraction’ of language-as-cut, its force of ‘extraction’, just as it is desirable to think of language as current or flow — that is, as a language of passage.
— Ritó Natálio

There is no geology on one side and stories on the other. There is, in fact, an axis of power and performance embedded within these geological objects and the narratives they tell about human history. The origins of the Anthropocene, moving back and forth across materiality and narrative, are intensely political in the ways they bring us into the present and shape world-making subjects.
— Kathryn Yusoff, “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” (2019)