There are artists who inhabit a medium. And there are those who inhabit a fracture.

Susana Aleixo Lopes belongs, unmistakably, to the latter. She does not move between sculpture and music as one might change rooms; she crosses between them as one might cross a border—aware of what is gained, and what must be left behind.

To speak with her is to enter a terrain where matter and voice are not opposites, but different temperatures of the same interior fire.

She is, by her own admission, two—yet indivisible. One Susana works in silence, shaping the density of objects, giving weight to what cannot be spoken. The other sings, writes, fractures language into melody, allows emotion to escape through vibration. Between them lies not contradiction, but tension. And from that tension, creation.

The Alter-Ego as Shelter, the Song as Escape

Her musical project, Salt Veil, was born not as an extension of her sculptural practice, but as a necessary deviation—a moment of “escape from life, but not from herself.”

It began, as so many artistic acts do, with unease. A lyric written in 2017—“Alice”—emerged from a world she perceived as increasingly unmoored, “a world of madness where we are hanging by a thread.”

There is something quietly prophetic in that image. Not because it predicts, but because it reveals. The artist does not forecast the world; she registers its tremors before they become visible to others.

Salt Veil would take form the following year, slowly, hesitantly, shaped in collaboration but anchored in an intensely personal vision. The debut album, released on November 11, carries within it that original fracture—between body and voice, between stillness and eruption.

It resists genre. It is called alternative rock, but the label dissolves upon listening. What remains is atmosphere: melancholic, obscure, theatrical. A music that does not ask to be consumed, but to be entered.

The Body That Refuses, the Voice That Insists

One of the most striking confessions in the interview is also one of its most intimate.

In “Get The Fuck Out Of My Body,” Susana articulates a sensation that borders on metaphysical rupture: the feeling that the soul no longer belongs to the body that contains it.

It is not a political statement. It is not even, strictly speaking, a narrative.

It is an experience.

Written during a period she describes as “depressive and strange,” the song becomes a cry not outward, but inward—a demand for alignment, for coherence, for the possibility that desire and capacity might once again meet.

Here, the two Susanas collide. The sculptor, bound to the physicality of material, and the singer, seeking escape through sound. The result is neither reconciliation nor resolution, but something more honest: coexistence.

Sculpture: The Imposition of Stillness

If music allows for fragmentation, sculpture demands confrontation.

Susana’s relationship with material—particularly wood—is both tactile and conceptual. She speaks of it as a living element, one that carries memory, transformation, and, at times, violence.

In one of her most evocative projects, developed during a residency in Gran Canaria, she incorporated charred wood collected from a recent wildfire into a sculptural installation.

Fire becomes form. Destruction becomes texture. The object becomes archive.

Her installations extend beyond the object itself, creating environments—spaces where video, sound, image, and structure converge into a single experiential field. Art, here, is not an isolated gesture, but a constructed reality.

And yet, despite this expansiveness, there is also solitude.

“I have to be one hundred percent focused on one area,” she admits.

The division is not strategic. It is necessary.

The Island as Condition—and Constraint

Like many Azorean artists, Susana’s work is shaped not only by internal landscapes, but by the external conditions of insularity.

Her reflections on the region’s air connectivity—particularly the contraction of routes and services—are not framed as policy critique alone, but as lived experience. The reduction of mobility, she suggests, is also a reduction of exchange: cultural, human, emotional.

“We are being isolated,” she says.

It is a sentence that resonates beyond logistics. Isolation, for an artist, is both condition and risk. It can foster introspection—but it can also limit circulation, recognition, dialogue.

Her own trajectory reflects this paradox. Thirteen years spent outside the Azores. Exhibitions abroad, including in places as distant as Pakistan. A return to São Miguel during the pandemic, followed by the slow, often frustrating process of reintroducing her work to a local context that does not always recognize it.

There is disappointment, but no resignation.

The Silence of Institutions, the Noise of Persistence

One of the recurring motifs in her testimony is invisibility.

Not the absence of work, but the absence of recognition. The sense that institutions tasked with cultural stewardship do not always know—or seek to know—the artists within their own geography.

It is a quiet critique, but a sharp one.

And yet, she resists the temptation of victimhood. To be an artist, she insists, is also to pursue, to propose, to insist on one’s presence in spaces that do not immediately open.

Still, the imbalance remains.

Opportunities are often self-initiated. Exposure uneven. The local market, in her view, remains hesitant—reluctant to engage with what is unfamiliar, to step beyond comfort into curiosity.

“It is all very labeled,” she observes. “We need to tear those labels apart, little by little.”

Music as Theatre, Theatre as Possibility

If sculpture anchors her in the physical, music allows her to imagine expansively.

Her vision for live performance is unmistakably theatrical: orchestras, scenography, layered visual narratives.

And yet, reality intervenes. Limited opportunities to perform constrain the evolution of that vision. A single concert since the album’s release. Scattered contacts. Modest reception.

Still, she adapts.

A self-produced “tiny desk”-style concert is in preparation—an act of creative autonomy in the absence of institutional platforms.

If there is no stage, one must be built.

Influence Without Imitation

Susana resists fixed references, yet traces of influence surface in her reflections.

The spectral atmosphere of David Lynch, the vocal intimacy of Leonard Cohen, the theatricality of Queen, the emotional depth of Etta James, the shifting architectures of Pink Floyd.

These are not influences to be replicated, but coordinates—points in a constellation that she navigates without settling.

Each song, she suggests, carries its own lineage.

The Ethics of Curiosity

Perhaps the most resonant thread in the interview is not about medium, or career, or even recognition.

It is about curiosity.

An insistence that art must be approached not as something to be judged at a distance, but as something to be experienced—repeatedly, patiently, without immediate comprehension.

“I go to consume art,” she says, using the word not in its transactional sense, but in its most visceral one: to absorb, to ingest, to allow oneself to be changed.

It is a philosophy that resists both indifference and immediacy.

Art, in this view, is not there to be liked. It is there to be encountered.

The Beauty of the Fracture

At the end of the conversation, a phrase emerges that feels less like an answer than a credo:

“There is always something beautiful—even in the grotesque.”

It is a statement that gathers everything that came before it.

The burned wood. The divided self. The voice that refuses silence.
The body that resists. The island that isolates and shelters in equal measure.

In Susana Aleixo Lopes, art is not resolution. It is persistence.

A way of remaining in the fracture without closing it.

A way of becoming two— so as not to disappear into one.

Translated and adapted from Complexo N

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