20 – 24 October 2026 at Évora, Portugal
Open to public
Organised by: Pó de Vir a Ser and Institute of Radical Imagination
In collaboration with: Sociedade Harmonia Eborense (SHE)
Dates: 20 – 24 October 2026
Venues: Pó de Vir a Ser, R. de Machede 58, 7000-864 Évora, Portugal / Sociedade Harmonia Eborense (SHE) Praça do Giraldo n°72, 7000-508 Évora, Portugal
Taking place from 20 to 24 October at the former Évora Slaughterhouse, which is now a cultural centre run by the Pó de Vir a Ser cultural association, Raio da Raia! – Uma Topia en Curso is an ongoing collaborative practice
“Peace, work and bread!”, Catarina Eufémia
Raio da Raia – una topia en curso is a five-day gathering jointly organised by Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) and Pó de Vir a Ser (Po) with the collaboration of Sociedad Harmonia Eborense (SHE) in Évora. Conceived as part of an ongoing relationship, it seeks to create the conditions for a shared reading of the present from the specific, situated coordinates of this encounter: Évora, 2026, at a moment marked by accelerating political radicalisation and the rise of the far right, alongside the intensification of climate change.
The gathering proposes to interrogate this moment and these coordinates through four interconnected lines of inquiry: 1) ecology, culture and territory; 2) a time of transition, echoing the different experiences of the Portuguese Revolution and the Spanish Transition; 3) cross-border imagination for political-artistic alliances and 4) public space as commons: thinking sculpture and (non-)monumentality for social justice.
Throughout the week, cultural workers, activists and inhabitants from the territories of the border, will explore ways to organise themselves through art in these uncertain times. O Raio da Raia opens up an internationalist alliance, connecting across territories and proposing ways of acting collectively through radical imagination. With a real time self-structure, the practice follows a few scores for our collective inflections: assemblies and conversations, critical walks, screenings, workshops and moments of collective creation.
The title plays with several meanings in Portuguese: raia names the borderland, especially the Portuguese-Spanish border; raios is both an exclamation — roughly “damn!” or “for heaven’s sake!” — and the plural of “ray”; and, when heard together, a raia can slip into arraia, an older word for “the people” or “the common folk.” The gathering thus places itself at the border in order to move beyond it: to ask what, and whom, its productive logics serve, but above all to make room for other ways of sensing, fabulating and imagining the world beyond the divisions that borders produce.
Pó de Vir a Ser is a space for artistic production, debate, and learning that works to counter the stagnation of thought, action, and culture, it is grounded in stone sculpture and the interdisciplinary intersections it fosters within the context of contemporary visual arts.
The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI) is a group of cultural workers, curators, artists, activists, and scholars with a shared interest in co-producing knowledge as artistic and political research-interventions aimed at implementing post-capitalist forms of life in the Mediterranean and the Global South.
The Sociedade Harmonia Eborense (SHE) is a cultural association founded in Évora in 1849, bringing together music, cinema, theatre, and visual arts within a shared space of encounter and collective participation. Rooted in voluntary engagement and intergenerational exchange, it connects the city’s cultural memory with contemporary artistic practices and the ongoing commitment to collectively shaping everyday life.
COLLECTIVE ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS
21 October
Venue: Pó de Vir a Ser
10H – 13H TARING PADI – T-shirt printing workshop – Raio da raia!
Taring Padi is an Indonesian art collective whose practices provoque collective artistic production. A hands-on t-shirt printing workshop where participants learn printing and transfer techniques and create their own piece from start to finish as tools for our collective self-production. The workshop opens up a common language in Raio da Raia with a collective creative act raised from Taring Padi tools to organise, educate and agitate.
Open to public with limited capacity. Registration required (geral@podeviraser.pt)
20 – 24 October
TARING PADI – Ongoing collective actions
Mural Painting on a 5-Metre Canvas
This mural painting on a five-metre canvas is conceived as a living document of the five-day encounter Raio da Raia. Rather than a straightforward record, the canvas becomes a living collective practice, raising an affective-political making with Taring Padi tools.
Art ongoing actions
Wanderings, thoughts and materialities for sculptural action. An open conversation about the power of stones, the history of sculpture, art and culture, imagining possible collective actions. We may make dreams rather than objects. We are open to whatever unfolds among the materialities and bodies in the space before us.
ASSEMBLIES, DEBATES AND PRESENTATIONS
20 October – Ecologies, art and territory
16H30 – 18H30 Assembly – Art, Mines and Quarries, with Bruno Caracol, Alexandra do Carmo and Carla Magro Dias. Accompanied by Rita Barreiro (IRI)
Venue: Sociedade Harmonia (SHE)
Mines and quarries are sites where extraction operates simultaneously on a geological and a social scale, cutting into strata formed over millions of years while also shaping the communities, labour, and living beings that inhabit the surface, leaving craters and valleys in the place of the hills that were excavated. In their presentations, Bruno Caracol, Alexandra do Carmo, and Carla Magro Dias will address these and other questions from their distinct artistic works.
These presentations will be the starting point for an open assembly on ecologies, art, and territories.The assembly will focus on these intersections, foregrounding the possibilities of art and cultural work to participate in environmental struggles, and to contest territories through the potencies of the radical imagination, thus unfolding intertwined movements: new belongings and subjectivities against the sedimented identities that circumscribe territories and borders; making visible and inquire power structures; mobilising bodies, positions and actions towards the production of fair territories for plural lives.
21st October – Revolution / Transition / Intervention
16H30 – 18H30 Assembly – Revolution / Transition / Intervention – New Practices Demand New Languages, with Ana Bigotte Vieria (IRI), Pedro Cerejo and Airton Montero
Venue: Sociedade Harmonia Eborense (SHE)
Taking as a point of departure the reflections and reports published in the journal INTERVENÇÃO between 1978 and 1984, this gathering connects past and present to rethink social intervention, grassroots organising, cooperativism, arts education and social emancipation. Its central proposition is to think these practices together: not to separate or isolate “sensitive areas,” “community work” and “artistic experiences” from a shared life that is built and thought together, bringing countryside and city into relation.
From 1978 to 1984, INTERVENÇÃO followed and debated social and cultural projects that emerged in Portugal after the 25 April Revolution. At the intersection of the emerging field of social work, cultural decentralisation, pedagogy and cultural animation, the journal sought to think these experiences over the longer term. In the wake of the literacy brigades, the MFA’s cultural dynamisation campaigns and the Student Civic Service, it addressed social participation, artistic training, sociological inquiry and cultural mediation beyond the “urgent ethnography” that marked its beginnings.
Its pages brought together texts by Mário Barradas and João Brites, sociologists such as Orlando Garcia and José Paquete de Oliveira, scientists such as José Mariano Gago, and numerous accounts of concrete social and cultural experiences across the country: from the Oficina da Criança and theatre groups in Santarém to CENDREV, the Casa da Cultura in Caldas da Rainha, and projects in Cerveira, Trás-os-Montes and Porto.
Pedagogy, literacy and popular festivities appeared alongside discussions of new media, cultural literacy, nightlife and LGBT culture, and Do-It-Yourself techniques. Reading INTERVENÇÃO today reveals a moment when the boundaries between art, culture, participation, social work, sociology and pedagogy were far more porous than they are now, and when new collective practices demanded new languages.
21H – 23H ACCIÓ Portabella AGORA !
Venue: Pó de Vir a Ser
Screening and open conversation with Sara Buraya Boned and Pablo García Bachiller (Institute of Radical Imagination).
General Report on Certain Matters of Interest Regarding Public Outreach, [Informe general sobre algunas cuestiones de interés para una proyección pública]. Père Portabella, 1976
General Report iI. the New Abduction of Europe, [Informe general II. El nuevo rapto de Europa], Père Portabella, 2015
Assemblies and discussions from Acampada 26O, Madrid, 2026 Video excerpts
Drawing on the prefigurative power of Pere Portabella’s cinema, this session explores the resonances between Informe general 1, Informe general 2 and the present. Three moments enter into dialogue: the Spanish Transition, the cycle of mobilisation and engagement with political institutions opened by the 15M movement, and today’s housing struggles, protest encampments and emerging forms of collective organisation.
With deep respect and admiration for Portabella’s work, which continues to challenge and mobilise us, we will begin with selected excerpts from Informe general 1, followed by excerpts from Informe general 2. We will then screen footage recently recorded in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, alongside other materials from ongoing struggles.
Bringing together elements of a community film forum, a VJ session and collective conversation, the gathering opens a space to consider what these images enable us to recognise, imagine and set in motion. What forms of life, care and political action are already prefiguring other futures?
An invitation to make cultural practice a place where existing networks meet, expand and explore new possibilities for collective action.
This session is organised in partnership with Filmoteca de Catalunya, as part of the centenary program on Pere Portabella’s oeuvre, Acción Portabella.
22st October – Sculpture and (non-)monumentality for a Topia to come
16H30 – 18H30 Assembly – Sculpture for Historical Memory and Political Action with interventions of Pedro Fazenda (Po), Clara Montoya, Theo Prodromidis (IRI) and Pablo García Bachiller (IRI)
Venue: Sociedade Harmonia Eborense (SHE)
Sculpture is a material and political practice through which territories, memories and relations of power can be mapped. Thinking through and with marble from the Mediterranean, the assembly will listen to, handle and live with stone, treating it as a material that carries histories of extraction, labour, debt, borders and economic power.
We will explore other ways of gaining and exercising collective power: from the material rubble of capitalist society and from the memory of the former slaughterhouse now home to Pó de Vir a Ser. Discarded materials and the histories of this place become starting points for imagining how power can be claimed, shared and exercised together.
Through collective walking, gathering, making and discussion, the assembly will bring the site’s layered histories into conversation with questions of who has the right to speak, occupy and shape public space. Sculpture becomes a situated encounter between matter, memory and collective action, opening ways of mapping Évora and Alentejo from the ground.
23st October – Raio da Raia! Conspiring across borders
16H00 – 17H00 Publishing around a Raia. Talking through books with Rui Silva and Tula Fernández
Venue: Sociedade Harmonia Eborense (SHE)
The Slight Difficulty of Being Spanish & The Fatal Sadness of Being Portugues, Gabinete Paratextual, 2022. Rui Silva
The Slight Difficulty of Being Spanish & The Fatal Sadness of Being Portuguese is a short essay on travel guides that analyzes, on discursive, textual, and iconographic levels, guides published about Portugal and Spain between the 1930s and 1980s. The book follows two exhibitions held in Porto (2022) and Madrid (2025), and contrasts the laudatory guides promoted by the Iberian dictatorships with caustic and satirical texts published in France. It also reveals how both countries used tourism as an economic and propaganda tool, projecting a favorable international image and transforming complex political and social realities into idealized representations. Amid stereotypes and ironies, we discover that, for the English, “the Portuguese people live on cod and dreams” and that “Spain preserves man […] with that freedom that only imprisoned peoples are capable of feeling.” The essay examines how these myths were incorporated into national identities and ritualized in everyday life as a kind of folk faith.
Cinco Cartas Portuguesas, Estrella del Norte, 2025. Tula Fernández
Lisbon, 25 April 1974. As the country breaks free from decades of dictatorship, Pedro Araujo recognises a woman from his past among the crowd: María Paula Cortés, a symbol of resistance and a pivotal figure in his own story.
Two lives shaped by struggle and love intertwine at the most decisive moment in Portugal’s history. In Five Portuguese Letters, Tula Fernández tells a story of love and memory, of shared ideals and diverging paths. A novel about what endures, even after years of dictatorship, distance and silence.
17H00 – 19H00 Conspiraciones transfronterizas – To conspire across borders – Raio da Raia! with Armando Juntas Territorio (Andy Luengo and Pat Naharro Aguilar, Cáceres), Miriam Bachiller Luque (La Línea de la Concepción, Cádiz), Tula Fernández (Ceuta), Jose XX (Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid) and Rui Silva (Oficina Arara). Acompanied by Sara Buraya Boned and Pablo García Bachiller (IRI)
This open assembly will open reflections around cultural collaboration between territories and international conspirations as a political horizon. This collaboration would allow us to create, expand, and strengthen a network of cross-border alliances within the symbolic framework of the Spanish-Portuguese border—Europe’s oldest and most stable frontier. We aim to shift the perspective away from the securitized, violent, and exclusionary view of “Fortress Europe” and instead open ourselves to the border’s more nuanced, human, and sensory fabric. This is an open invitation to “conspire” together—to forge new international, intergenerational, and interspecies alliances spanning the Alentejo and Extremadura regions and beyond, in a moment of global struggles for life, as the housing movement is travsversally operating and coordinating, bringing hope for a collective subject to re-emerge.
From the Raia alentejo-extremeña, to Ceuta or La Línea as border territories of violence and dispossession, but also of solidarity and political insurgence. We want to recover the history of past relations while also envisioning new ones. We wish to bring together cultural agents currently active in the region who feel a connection to this call. We want to challenge the oft-repeated notion that Spaniards turn their backs on Portugal. Above all, because it simply isn’t true: there are so many of us—Portuguese and Spanish alike—who look at one another, recognize each other, and desire the fraternity and sisterhood our peoples deserve.
24st October – Cooperativism and Collective Artistic Action
Venue: Pó de Vir a Ser
11H00 – 12H00 Cooperativism in the territorial commons, round table with Joaquim Moreno and Margarida Mendes. Accompanied by Rita Barreira (IRI)
This conversation brings together ecology and territory to inquire cooperativism in the territorial commons. Margarida Mendes tarting from field research in wetlands and rivers throughout Portugal, Margarida Mendes’ intervention proposes a space to think about the relationships between communities, materials and distribution flows that are established through them. Her empirical observations are crossed with investigations by scientists and experiences reported by local inhabitants and river guardians, in a confluence of perspectives between science, activism, and environmental justice, and the work she developed with the collective Natural Contract Lab over the past decade.
“Cultivating property” is Joaquim Moreno´s presentation and it transplants a title to build a bridge with this movement, seeking common ground with the questions through which cooperation challenges land tenure systems. Who owns what: who owns the land, and what grows on it, and what rests upon it? Who produces, who reproduces, who appropriates, who governs, who manages, who legislates?
The new configurations of architecture and landscape depend on the new sociotechnical configurations of territories, and on modes of use and ownership. Without a new relationship with the land, it is very difficult to envision other ecologies, other ways of producing, building, and inhabiting. Cultivating is a form of active, experimental attention—of posing questions that sow seeds and foster cooperative plantings—and of caring for our shared growth, of cultivating and being cultivated, of witnessing the very slow explosion of the seed, somewhere between a vegetable garden and a library, between the neighborhood and chance.
Together, these two presentations open us to consider ecology and territory as intertwined issues of commoning, governance, and spatial justice rather than as separate domains.
12H00 Presentation of the Mural painted during the week
This mural painting on a five-metre canvas is conceived as a living document of the five-day encounter Raio da Raia. Rather than a straightforward record, the canvas becomes a living collective practice, raising an affective-political making with Taring Padi tools.
Taring Padi is an Indonesian artists collective founded in 1998 by a group of progressive art students and activists in response to the Indonesian socio-political upheavals during the country’s reformation era. Street protests, woodcutting workshops, art carnivals, and exhibitions in unorthodox spaces are typical of Taring Padi’s practice of producing collective works. Diverse ad hoc political alliances, farming and fishing communities, as well as their own localities are places where Taring Padi work and learn together. Banners, woodcut posters, and cardboard puppets, as well as the ever popular Dendang Kampungan music group are Taring Padi’s artistic formulas to agitate, educate, and organise themselves, their community, and diverse solidarity actions they are involved in.
16H30 Final Plenary – Party
This open assembly will close Raio da Raia – una topia en curso to summarise the collective learnings and strategies of the present days, and to collectively think how we could keep collaborating, coordinating, conspiring, in the years to come.
