A Home with No Roof

A Home With No Roof was Sara De Brito Faustino’s diploma project (2023) at ECAL. “This project presents the home as a place where uncanniness and vernacular commonness exist side by side. Being an intimate space, a home should be a restful and secure place. However, mine has been the scene of some painful events. Today, I see this house as threatening. Uncomfortable and dysfunctional, it bears the scars of the past. In my photographs, I revisit those memories and reclaim my body.My tiny dioramas express my young self’s ideals opposed to the wounds I currently bear. Constructing, deconstructing, objects become bodies, whereas my being feels deformed and petrified. A Home with no Roof creates an antagonistic tension between appealing visuals and disturbing details.“- Sara De Brito FaustinoPhMuseum: (Lucia De Stefani)“By reconstructing her childhood home, Faustino’s miniature world reshapes personal trauma into a visual narrative, inviting viewers to look closer and confront what lies beneath the surface. At first glance, her work feels delicate—dollhouse-like interiors bathed in soft light, miniatures arranged with precision. But on closer look, things become unsettling. A tooth rests on the edge of a bathtub. A foot balances on an egg carton. A naked body sprouts extra limbs. These small-scale scenes blur the line between childhood wonder and something more fractured, more fragile.A Home With No Roof explores what happens when childhood is unstable, when home is stripped of its sheltering qualities. Through carefully composed images, Sara De Brito Faustino creates a world where domestic life feels exposed—and the roof never fully closes. Her work wrestles with childhood and adulthood, protection and vulnerability. Miniatures, an art her grandmother was dedicated to, became both a refuge and a tool to process trauma. By recreating her childhood apartment at a small scale, Faustino gained control over its memories. Yet, the delicate nature of these objects—carefully placed in the scene with tweezers—highlighted their fragility, reinforcing how easily things could break, an underlying tension that defines her work.“I felt it would be easier on a smaller scale, because I would have control and I would have power over the stories and over the scenes,” Faustino explains. “So I started rebuilding my apartment on a small scale and it actually gave me a sense of control and of comfort. But also there is a certain fragility and vulnerability,” she says.Faustino works with air-dry ceramics, paint, everyday scraps—like lids, packaging, discarded household items—transforming them into miniature bowls, pans, and plates. Objects take on new meaning. And each image tells a story. In one, she appears pregnant, her belly sculpted from clay and plaster. But the focus here isn’t motherhood, she explains—it’s womanhood, and the tension between creation and confinement. She plays with contrast: hard against soft, solid against unstable. A foot presses onto an egg carton that somehow doesn’t collapse—fragility transformed into unexpected strength. In another, a seat appears to be made of butter, subverting expectations.Stray hairs, body parts, and insects disrupt the stillness or her images, hinting at something unspoken. This quiet distortion mirrors her own experience—how a home can appear intact while something beneath the surface is unraveling.“This idea that everyday life from afar seems really polished in a way, but when you live in a dysfunctional home, if you look closely, it becomes scary and disgusting,” Faustino says. “The idea of miniature is also to look close.”One image stands out: an arm, newly constructed. In photographing this altered body, Faustino captures a sense of stability—as if, with an extra limb, she is now more anchored. Her work is indeed a process of rebuilding, both literally and metaphorically. She constructs this new protective shell—not just in objects, but in herself. What once symbolized fragility becomes a testamen