Antunes builds with measurement the way others build with narrative: as a method of remembering, translating, and re-weighting history. Her “fragile structures” are not delicate decorations; they are calibrated propositions about architecture’s hidden lineages—craft, domestic labor, textile intelligence, and the often-erased authorship of women within modernism’s supposedly clean genealogy. She takes dimensions from buildings, objects, and design vocabularies, then re-scores them into suspended geometries: cords, brass, leather, wood—materials that carry the memory of touch. What makes Antunes compelling is the discipline of restraint. She refuses monumentality, not out of shyness, but as critique: a spatial ethic that avoids domination. Her installations behave like instruments tuned to the room—light, shadow, and bodily movement become collaborators. The viewer’s pace changes; attention lowers into the joints, the knots, the tension points. This is where her politics quietly live: in the insistence that space can be composed through care rather than command. Antunes turns sculpture into a choreographic pedagogy. You learn by walking, by noticing how a line pulls a volume, how a hanging element redefines a threshold. The fragility is rigorous: it holds, but it never pretends to be eternal. It proposes an architecture of relations, not of conquest.
