“Unearthing petroglyphs: towards a new semiotics of Alentejo’s cup-marks” is an ongoing project by Pousio that investigates gestures of subtraction in the landscape: excavations, extractions, erosions, and silences, as both material and symbolic actions. Grounded in research on cup-marks—covinhas: an archaeological term for round petroglyphs and concave depressions carved into rock and scattered across the Alentejo—the project proposes a speculative archaeology that intersects geology, memory, and food culture.

Through a video installation and lecture-performance format, the work develops a semiological and ritual reading of these forms, approaching them as archives inscribed in matter and as relational devices between past, present, and future. The covinhas emerge as liminal forms, oscillating between function and symbolism, natural erosion and human intervention, trace and fabulation.

The project unfolds as a para-scientific laboratory for collective fabulation, experimenting with ways of archiving and reactivating bastardised or forgotten heritage. Through mappings, collections, and visual and sound recordings, a speculative inventory takes shape as an evolving body of material that interrogates the contemporary landscape and its narratives.

Remaining open and processual, the work positions the covinhas as mutable archetypes and critical portals for imagining alternative readings of territory and its material and symbolic geographies.

Pousio (Fallow 1. left uncultivated or unsown after ploughing; 2. dormant, inactive) is a transdisciplinary research collective centred on the Alentejo region. Questioning institutionalised ways of engaging with material culture, the collective’s practice explores alternative approaches to urgent challenges affecting the region, such as soil depletion, the intensification of monocultural regimes, shifting food cultures, and the erosion of vernacular knowledge.