A sea hangs from wooden rods, made entirely of worn jeans and offcuts from earlier works. Its waves are seams, its foam is frayed cotton. Come closer and small boats appear, embroidered into the denim, so small you need a torch to find them. The torch is yours to hold. In the half dark, the light in your hand decides what surfaces and what stays under.

The room is full of sound. Gulls, the creak of rigging, a storm rising, and against it the slow break of water on sand. Underneath, a heartbeat.

MARÉ(E) / TIDE

Maré(e) is a textile installation made from worn jeans collected over years, together with offcuts from my earlier works. The title holds two languages at once: maré, the tide in Portuguese, and marée in French.

The material was not chosen at random, and neither was the city it travelled to. The word “jeans" comes from “Gênes". Bleu de Gênes, the cloth Genoa exported across Europe from the sixteenth century, gave denim its name. I sewed a sea out of used jeans and carried it by train to Genoa, to hang it in the Maritime Museum, facing the port the cloth had left from.

The shapes embroidered into the surface are not all boats. A fishing vessel. A sailing boat. A flotilla. A crossing made in something never built for it. And a house, flooded, coming apart in the waves. A home, not a vessel.

Every fragment of denim held a body before it became a wave.

Maré(e) was presented in:

TROPICAL FUSION
Collective exhibition for the opening of Magma, Arcueil, France 30 May 2026.
First presentation of the work, in the space where it was made.

BIENNALE LE LATITUDINI DELL'ARTE
VII edizione: Francia/Italia
Galata Museo del Mare, Genoa, Italy, 4 July to 6 September 2026

“Ana Isabel Freitas transforms texture into the vibrant body of a landscape that, à la Deleuze, creates territory by shifting between smooth and striated space. Her work lays out a tactile cartography of fragments voyaging across a stormy sea, referencing the up-and-down motion of the sea, and also, metaphorically, the arrival of migrants."

Viana Conti, 
Biennale Le Latitudini dell'Arte catalogue, 2026.