Leica Project Room Lisboa

Av. da Liberdade 258, 1250-149 Lisboa

Inauguration → 03 . 10 . 2026 → 05:00 pm

03 . 10 . 2026 → 07 . 11 . 2026

monday - saturday → 10:00 am – 07:00 pm

Artist

Gonçalo Fonseca

“New Lisbon” (2019–2021) explores the impact of housing insecurity on some of Lisbon’s most vulnerable residents. In the city centre, Gonçalo Fonseca documents elderly people subjected to real-estate harassment and threatened with eviction. In the outskirts, he follows single mothers who occupy empty apartments in the hope of giving their children a better life. Over the course of the project, Fonseca traced the pulse and expansion of the city, creating an extensive chronicle of the consequences of decades of failed housing policies in the Portuguese capital.

Even before the start of the pandemic, more than 10,000 families had already lost their homes in Lisbon. Foreign investment and the rapid growth of the short-term rental industry, combined with low wages, helped fuel a deep housing crisis in the city. By 2019, when the project began, Lisbon was already the European city, and the fifth in the world, where residents struggled the most to afford rent. In 2026, the median rent for new contracts stands at €17.42 per square metre, meaning that an 80 m² two-bedroom apartment costs around €1,400 per month.

“New Lisbon” received the Leica Oskar Barnack Award – Newcomer (2020), the Estação Imagem – Daily Life Award (2020), and the Yunghi Grant (2020). It was also a finalist in Pictures of the Year International (2021) and has been exhibited across four continents.