A Home With No Roof by Sara De Brito Faustino at Foto Forum

Reimagined specifically for the space, this exhibition invites visitors to immerse themselves in the world of the series, bringing together images from the original project and her book of the same title.

Overview

Based on meticulous down scaled reconstructions of her childhood apartment she transforms the debris of ordinary life into miniature scenes of unease. While home is supposed to be a place of reassurance, comfort, and safety, for Sara De Brito Faustino, it has always felt like a place where she does not belong, estranged from her own past. In search of catharsis she aims to recall this dysfunctional space while keeping a safe distance.

Everyday life slips into the grotesque, fragments of bodies emerge unexpectedly, at times oversized, at others depleted and hollow. Those compositions are silent traces of experiences that resist being fully articulated. Strands of long brown hair are trapped under an ironing board; the ripped out adult tooth rests on the bathtub edge; hangers are piercing through a flesh-like house. There is a big finger print on the TV, while the chair arbors a glistening surface. Meanwhile, the artist’s body seems stiff and petrified. Shifts in scale and textures transform the apartment into a monstrous entity; she appears both as subject and object within it, re-enacting a state of dissociation. Sometimes, these spaces are not on the right scale. It appears as though she stretches the narrow nooks wide, yet remains compressed in confined spaces, bumping her head against the ceiling while three legs are keeping her upright.

A Home With No Roof moves beyond the conventions of photography, drawing on construction, performance, and mise-en-scène. Its images emerge from carefully assembled layers of narrative, held together by a deliberately fragile visual language that oscillates between roughness and an extremely polished aesthetic, creating an uncanny dissonance.

Here in Bolzano, Sara De Brito Faustino continues this visual tension through the relationship between the exhibition space and the work itself. By manipulating scale and reality, both within the images and through the exhibition’s scenography, she creates an environment that unsettles perception. Visitors are left uncertain of the dimensions of their own bodies. Several spatial interventions suggest that both personal stories and the process of making persist, etched into the architecture. This new proposition, here in Bolzano, further grounds her practice in site-specificity, intimacy, and domestic narratives, while questioning the boundaries between public and private spheres.

About The Artist

Sara De Brito Faustino (1999, NL/PT) lives and works in Lausanne, Switzerland. Since graduating she has taken part in group exhibitions in Switzerland and Europe. She has been nominated for several awards, including the DIOR Photography Award for Young Talent and FOAM Talent 2026. The artist also recently won the Swiss Design Award.