José Bértolo (1987) is a Portuguese artist and scholar based in Lisbon. His work uses the photographic image as a tool for thinking and for making sense of reality — sometimes against verbal language, sometimes in alliance with it. Finding resonance in Japanese philosophy and aesthetics, his practice emerges from questions about transience, memory, death and spectrality, and encounters with the non-human. Alongside his artistic practice, he teaches and conducts research at NOVA University of Lisbon, in the fields of Photography and Film Studies.