Salette Tavares, poet, art critic, performer and teacher, was born in the city of Lourenço Marques, now Maputo (Mozambique), on 31 March, and lived in Lisbon from 1933.

She graduated in Historical-Philosophical Sciences from the University of Lisbon (1948) and went on to study aesthetics, language and art theory in France and Italy, thanks to a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1959-1961), working with Mikel Dufrenne, Étienne Souriau and Gillo Dorfles. At the same time, she dedicated herself to poetry, publishing her first book, Blind mirror, in 1957. Throughout her career, academic training and poetic practice were intertwined in research and theorising about visual poetry, practising in the fields of text and form.

The 1960s were a very important decade for Salette Tavares: in 1964 she travelled to various cities in the United States, published the book Concerto in E Major and for clarinet and drums, collaborated on the first Caderno de poesia experimental and taught Aesthetics at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes, whose lessons – without the illustrations – were published in the journal Brotéria (1965-1969); in 1965 she took part in the Visopoemas exhibition at the Galeria Divulgação, with António Aragão, E. M. Melo e Castro and António Barahona Fonseca in the first ‘happening’ in Portugal, reciting Ode à crítica, and published the book 14563 letras de Pedro Sete; in 1966 the second Cadernos de poesia experimental published his poem Brinca deiras, and in 1967 the book Quadrada was published.

In the following decade, she published another book of poems, Lex icon (1971), in 1974 she presented the ‘happening’ Sou Toura Petra at Ar.Co, and became president of the Portuguese Section of AICA, a position she held until 1977. In 1979, Galeria Quadrum organised a retrospective of her visual poetry.

In 1992, her poetic production was published with Poesia 1957-1971 by Imprensa Nacional, which ten years later published Obra poética 1957/1994 (2002) with all her poetry, including the unpublished poetry found in her estate by Catherine Dumas. In the meantime, Salette Tavares’ heirs have decided to publish out-of-print and unpublished books at Tigre de Papel: Lex icon facsimile (2017), Irrar (2019), Outro Outro (2019), O Kágado – Baile Mecânico – Anonimatógrafo (2019), Lex icon (2020), Sintra no Jardim da Esmeralda (2022), Cartas e letras de Pedro Sete (2024), Antologia/Poesia (2024), and A dialética das formas is still in production.

In 2014, the Centro de Arte Moderna dedicated the exhibition Spatial poetry to her, and in 2022, the centenary of her birth, the Fernando Pessoa University organised a colloquium on her poetic, pedagogical and artistic work.

Salette Tavares died in Lisbon in 1994.

Her plastic work is represented in the collection of the Centro de Arte Moderna.