Is a Portuguese artist based in Paris. She focuses on painting, drawing, installation and ceramics to raise questions about the formal and conceptual representation of bodies. Zenha starts from the cultural and social conditioning factors that influence how we experience our own corporeality and our relationships in order to, through her works, try to plant visual metaphors that germinate into possible social transformations.

Her intensely coloured pastels depict intimate scenes starring hybrid characters, where plants and genderless humans are entangled between feathers, thorns and tails in an embrace. Her representations suggest a kind of utopia beyond gender and the hegemony of the human over the rest of the species, proposing an elusive fluidity instead. She uses plants as companions but also as models. As described by Emmanuel Coccia in his book The Life of Plants, plant life is the most paradigmatic form of being in the world; a form in which everything merges. Plants cover the earth but do not dominate or conquer it; their model is resilient and flexible, based on a collaborative architecture, without a command centre and deeply adaptive.

This pattern provided by the plants is perhaps close to other definitions of love that Inés seems to suggest with her ceramic sculptures. An idea that evokes the theoretical works in which bell hooks tried to provide more clarity to this concept. According to the theorist and activist, it is essential to redefine the term as a verb and an action; as an act of will in which responsibility becomes primordial. Because if we didn't have the tendency to forget that love is what love does, we would not use the word in ways that devalue and degrade its meaning.

Fragment from the main text of the group exhibition Tales or disorder, a project curated by Cristina Anglada (Pelaires 2023).