Your body is a battleground and—socially, politically, visually, art historically speaking—it has been for as long as you can remember. Last November, standing in a sold-out crowd at London’s Brixton Academy, Kae Tempest, the spoken word performer, author, playwright, and poet, sang ‘Till Morning,’ the exhale of a coda from his self-titled album that describes the reality of surviving domestic abuse. (‘When the past is a dirty swamp, Full of shapes that you can't look at square on, Keep going.’) The track leaves the crowd of almost 5000 people breathless. Some weep inconsolably. The collective pain of some, held by the hearts of many.

In the track, Tempest goes beneath all the rage and trauma, focusing on collective resilience–using music to disappear into, taking the room along with him. The artist Sara de Brito Faustino has a similar approach to picture making; excavating her past in search of catharsis and liberation for herself and viewers in need. The artist isn’t interested in the tradition of photography—imaging life as is—but instead roots her work in dramaturgy and construction, building layer upon layer of narrative and materiality in elaborate tableaux that occupy a space between image, performance and installation. Here she attempts to grapple with life’s most complex and haunting issues, while resisting the flattening that photography can so easily do.

In A Home With No Roof, she sublimates her experience of domestic abuse, in a turbulent collision of dreams and memories. Based on a meticulous 1:12-scale model reconstruction of her childhood home, the camera traces the detritus of domestic life made miniature. Scenes are familiar, yet nothing is quite right. The tone shifts between the ordinariness of the everyday and sheer horror: strands of long red hair stranded on the ironing board, an adult tooth laid bare with the root intact, and a fork ferociously embedded in a human thigh. Fragments of bodies erupt unexpectedly, sometimes grossly oversized and at other times deflated and hollow. The glint of stacks of dishes and spilt coffee moves your eye, for an instant, away from the artist’s figure, a looming presence, both dominant and awkward, amongst a sea of unease.

SARA DE BRITO FAUSTINO is an artist and photographer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. Having worked with photography for twelve years, her artistic approach focuses on the intimate and how she questions reality. De Brito Faustino transforms images of daily life into a stage on which she reenacts personal stories. In 2025, Faustino received the DIOR Photography Award for Young Talent.

GEM FLETCHER is a writer and podcaster. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Photography, Aperture, Dazed, It's Nice That and AnOther, and she has written catalogue texts for Rhiannon Adam, Juan Brenner, Maggie Shannon and Flora Hanitijo, amongst others. In 2019, Gem launched the Messy Truth podcast, a series of candid conversations that unpack the future of visual culture and what it means to be a photographer today. Guests include Antwaun Sargent, Catherine Opie, Farah Al Qasimi, Carmen Winant, Paul Kooiker, Quil Lemons, Brea Souders and Laia Abril.