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
Credits:
Curatorial team – Ana Bigotte Vieira, Rita Barreira, Sara Buraya Boned, Pablo García Bachiller, Theo Prodromidis.
Coordination and production – Pó de Vir a Ser: Mariana Mata Passos, Filipa Madeira, Eduardo Freitas, André Batista, José Fernandes / Institute of Radical Imagination: Ana Bigotte Vieira, Rita Barreira, Sara Buraya Boned, Pablo García Bachiller, Theo Prodromidis
Communication – Rita Barreira, Sara Buraya Boned, Pó de Vir a Ser: Filipa Madeira, Theo Prodromidis
Design: Luís Luz
Accountancy: Rita Barreiro, Sara Buraya Boned, Xana Libanio & Pó de Vir a Ser
With special thanks to: all the participants of the programme, SHE (Filipe Rebelo, João Parreira, Isaque), Pó (Pedro Fazenda, Paula Freitas, Adrian Graça), Casa Branca, Marco Baravalle, Emanuele Braga and all the IRI people specially Taring Padi crew
…and to the first conspiracies with Mariana Mata Passos.
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
21st 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)
20th – 24th 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
20th 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.
22nd 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 Matos (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.
24th 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.
PARTICIPANTS
Armando Juntas el Territorio (Andy Luengo y Pat Naharro Aguilar) is a community project in the form of a series of days that seeks to strengthen the social fabric through culture, encounters and citizen participation. The days emerged as a response to the lack of free spaces for exchange and participation among young people from the territory, and are organised through an open call addressed to artists, collectives and cultural agents connected to the territory of Extremadura. Living together is at the heart of the project: over four days, workshops, debates, artistic interventions and communal meals are shared in order to encourage the creation of networks, mutual learning and active participation. In 2026, the days took place in the neighbourhood of Aldea Moret (Cáceres), with the aim of decentralising cultural activity and highlighting the memory and social richness of peripheral neighbourhoods. We understand culture as a tool for guaranteeing cultural rights and strengthening communities through a critical, conscious and collaborative culture. Through participatory methodologies and a programme built collectively, the project aims to establish itself as an itinerant initiative that, in future editions, will travel through other territories of Extremadura in order to continue decentralising culture, strengthen existing networks and make visible the cultural practices of young people who are already sustaining the territory.
Míriam Bachiller Luque holds a degree in Geography and History and has developed her professional career as a shopkeeper in La Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz, Spain). Her connection to the city combines her knowledge of its everyday reality with her participation in initiatives related to historical research, dissemination and cultural management. In recent years, she has worked on recovering local memory through popular historical research based on interviews with residents of La Línea. This work brings together testimonies, memories and experiences that contribute to documenting the history of the city through the voices of its inhabitants. She has also participated in the Círculo de Estudios Linenses, dedicated to the study and dissemination of the municipality’s history. As an active member involved in the management of the Ateneo de la Bahía, she has collaborated over the years in the organisation and development of numerous activities, working with local, regional and international cultural and scientific agents, including participants from Morocco. Her experience connects oral memory, associative work and cultural practice in a territory marked by the border, and brings a situated perspective to the relationships between culture, community and cross-border exchange.
Míriam Bachiller Luque holds a degree in Geography and History and has developed her professional career as a shopkeeper in La Línea de la Concepción (Cádiz, Spain). Her connection to the city combines her knowledge of its everyday reality with her participation in initiatives related to historical research, dissemination and cultural management. In recent years, she has worked on recovering local memory through popular historical research based on interviews with residents of La Línea. This work brings together testimonies, memories and experiences that contribute to documenting the history of the city through the voices of its inhabitants. She has also participated in the Círculo de Estudios Linenses, dedicated to the study and dissemination of the municipality’s history. As an active member involved in the management of the Ateneo de la Bahía, she has collaborated over the years in the organisation and development of numerous activities, working with local, regional and international cultural and scientific agents, including participants from Morocco. Her experience connects oral memory, associative work and cultural practice in a territory marked by the border, and brings a situated perspective to the relationships between culture, community and cross-border exchange.
Rita Barreira (1979) combines research with artistic work. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Artistic Studies – Art and Mediations at the Institute of Art History, NOVA-FCSH. Her work focuses on artistic production shaped by collectivisms, independent culture and self-organization in Southern Europe. Her writing unfolds as articles, essays, conversations, exhibitions, performances, and other collaborative projects. Among her recent works are “Vagueness or a Suburban Clearing” (Clareiras, EarthSea, 2026), The Performativity of Political Acts and Artefacts (Wrong Wrong magazine, 2025), Il Vento Solo Non Può (KTH, 2024), The Procession of the Sealed Doors (Translocal, 2022), and Quadrúmano (Lisbon Municipal Gallery, 2021). She recently co-organized the exhibitions “Andor! Encounters, Street Demonstrations and Living Spaces in Póvoa de Varzim (1976–2024)” (Póvoa de Varzim, 2024) and “Artistic Practices Under Lockdown” (CAC – Torres Vedras, 2022); and participated in group exhibitions/performances such as “The Birds” (Estrela Decadente & Group of Therapeutic Theater, 2026), “Corpo–Manifestação” (Performing the Archive, 2024), “Manifestos e Manifestações” (Estrela Decadente, Farra, 2024), and “Forro” (Hors Lits, 2023). She has worked with archives, communication, and programming roles at arts organizations such as Rumo do Fumo, Fórum Dança, Performing the Archive, and Pó de Vir a Ser. She is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination.
Ana Bigotte Vieira is a historian, cultural critic, dramaturg, and curator. Her research focuses on experimentalism in the arts and its intersections with cultural and urban transformations. She is currently a Research Fellow on the RESONANCE projectç (LISBOA2030-FEDER-00914500) and an Assistant Researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History (NOVA). She is also an affiliated researcher with the PERCUR research project at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Ana was Co-PI, with Maria João Brilhante, of the University of Lisbon project ARTHE – Archiving Theatre. Between 2018 and 2023, she was part of the programming team at Teatro do Bairro Alto, Lisbon. She is the author of A Caixa Preta e Outros Mal-Entendidos (2025) and Uma Curadoria da Falta (2022), and co-editor (with Ana Dinger, João dos Santos Martins and Carlos Manuel Oliveira) of Dança Não Dança – Archaeologies of New Dance in Portugal (2024), developed within the ongoing long-term artistic research project Para Uma Timeline a Haver she coordinates with João dos Santos Martins since 2016. She is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination.
Sara Buraya Boned (Madrid, 1986) is a cultural worker and network’s weaver. She Graduated in Art History at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and made the MA in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at UAM-UCM and Museo Reina Sofía. She works at the Museo Reina Sofía, where she began as an assistant in the Collections Department (2009–2011). Since 2013, she has been accompanying, in different ways, cultural programmes, public activities and collaborative networks from within the institution. She is coordinator of the Museo Tentacular Department. Between 2020 and 2023 she was the project leader of the European confederation of museums L’Internationale. She has been member of the editorial board of L’Internationale Online from 2018 to 2024, where she has co-edited the publications Towards a Collective Study in Times of Emergency (2024), Stories and Threads. Perspectives on Art Archives (2022), Degrowth and Progress (2020), Feminisms (2018). Her research and institutional work are shaped by a commitment to transfeminisms, politics of care, new institutionalism, archives and the memory of social movements. As part of her political and cultural practice, she is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination, AMECUM (Association of Cultural Mediators of Madrid) and the assembly of Museo Situado. Along her path, she has been part of autonomous projects and collectives like somateca, Calipsofacto, Archivos Comunes or Chantal.
Bruno Caracol (1980) He studied Fine Arts at FBAUL. In recent years, he has focused his work on resonant objects, fictional futures, and the relationship with the non-human world. In 2017, he completed a master’s degree in Communication Sciences at FCSH-NOVA, exploring the modern construction of the idea of “wild nature”; Since 2017, he has been working on artifacts related to the coexistence of humans and wolves, with exhibitions at the Cerveira Biennial, Rural Vivo Gerês, SMUP, and the Barroso Ecomuseum, among others. With the Sphere4 collective, he developed the Waterworld project, exploring the submersion of coastal and riverside areas, featuring an exhibition at the Convent of Santo António in Loulé and a sound walk at the Ilustração à Vista Festival in Ílhavo. Since 2018, he has collaborated as a set designer with Um Coletivo; he has exhibited at the São Paulo Cultural Center in São Paulo, at Rampa in Porto, at the Materiais Diversos Festival in Minde, and in Elvas; he was an artist-in-residence at Lugar a Dudas in Cali and at Can Serrat in Barcelona, and collaborated with the Capacete residency program in Rio de Janeiro.
Alexandra do Carmo is an artist and researcher whose work bridges drawing, video, performance, and social engagement. She holds a PhD in Artistic Studies Art and Mediations from Nova University (FCSH-IHA), an MFA in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute, having studied at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in New York and Ar.CO in Lisbon. She problematises the concept of authorship by displacing the studio to non-artistic workplaces, confronting other realities and subjects, as well as diverse historical, social, and spatial contexts, transforming it into a dynamic site for research and dialogue. Notable projects include: O Ateliê Verde no IC19 (2018), Studio Socialis (2010), and The Steam Shop. A more recent collaboration includes the Red Line Campaign with the Youth Climate Strike in Lisbon, in which the artist engages directly with societal issues and fosters collaborative creation. By situating the studio within the realm of public activism, do Carmo challenges conventional notions of artistic production and underscores the potential of art as a catalyst for social and political engagement. She is currently involved in a collaborative project on Invasive Species at Air 351 in Cascais, and in the near future will participate at the International Conference on Performance Dramaturgies at Nova University and at Counterimage conference at the University of Algarve.
Pedro Cerejo (Brussels, Belgium, 1974) holds a degree in Anthropology. He has worked as a journalist, bookseller, and librarian, and is currently a translator and copy editor, as well as an editorial assistant at Imprensa de Ciências Sociais of ICS. Moving between books and newspapers, he is a PhD candidate in Theatre Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon (FLUL), with a dissertation analysing the importance of the daily press in the emergence and development of the Portuguese independent theatre movement during the final years of the dictatorship (1971–1974). He was a researcher on the ARTHE project, which examined the creation and current state of the archives of twenty Portuguese theatre companies, seeking ways to support the development of their archival work. He has also participated in the research activities of the BRINCAR project, which studies experiences of work for and with children in the period following the 25 April 1974 Revolution.
Airton César Monteiro is a communicator, writer, and cultural organiser. He holds a degree in International Relations and writes on social issues, urban culture, and community dynamics, with particular attention to the experiences and realities of peripheral territories. He has published chronicles and reports in platforms such as A Mensagem, Gerador, Revista MIL, Comunidade Cultura e Arte, Máxima, and Contracoutura. In the series Chelas É Futebol, for A Mensagem, he writes about neighbourhood sports clubs, exploring their social role, their relationship with local communities, and the importance of grassroots associations in the life of these territories. He is the founder of the associations Chelas É Sítio and Kriativu, through which he has developed cultural and social intervention projects, promoting community initiatives and opportunities for participation. Independently, he has also developed curatorial work and taken part in conversations on culture and society, collaborating with festivals such as Política, Iminente, BOOM, and Sol da Caparica.
Pedro Fazenda was born in Coimbra in 1957. He studied drawing, painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture at AR.CO – Center for Art and Visual Communication, Lisbon. He has exhibited individually since 1986 and collectively since 1979. Among these exhibitions, the 1990 group exhibition 7 New Artists. Homage to João Cutileiro at the Gulbenkian Modern Art Center stands out, where he exhibited alongside José Pedro Croft, José Esteves, Maria Felizol, Manuel Rosa, António de Campos Rosado and Silvia Westphalen. In addition to his work in stone sculpture and design, he has participated in several International Sculpture Symposia, designed and created a number of public sculptures, collaborated on architecture, urban planning and restoration projects, created stage designs for theatre, and led training activities in stone sculpture. Since 1985, he has been responsible for the Stone Sculpture Department at the Évora Cultural Center, an open space equipped for artistic work in stone. At that time, the Évora City Council made part of the former slaughterhouse facilities available to the Stone Sculpture Department, thus transforming a space of industrial production into a space of cultural production. Since 2017, the Stone Sculpture Department has been part of the Pó de Vir a Ser Cultural Association. Within the Association, where he is a member of the board, he has been developing personal and community-based work on the materiality of contemporary creation, on the use/reuse of different materials resulting from industrial activity, and on urban intervention, participating in the creation of the city.
Tula Fernández holds degrees in Classical Philology and Spanish Language and Literature. She has a PhD in Educational Sciences from the University of Granada and combines teaching with writing. She has won several literary awards, including the National Historical and Democratic Memory Competition, organised by the Truth Commission (Madrid) in 2024, with her short story Los recuerdos de la tierra. She has published three novels: La boca de los cien besos, which was nominated as a finalist for the Premio Talento in 2021. In 2022, she published La inocencia de los sublimes, which received the Sello Talento, a distinction for literary quality awarded by the Caligrama publishing house. In 2025, she published Cinco cartas portuguesas with Editorial Estrella del Norte, with a prologue by Pilar del Río. She is the dean of the Instituto de Estudios Ceutíes, an organisation that promotes culture and the study of the historical, scientific, literary, artistic and socioeconomic aspects of Ceuta and its surroundings. Her article “Prometeo en la frontera: papel integrador de la educación y la cultura entre Ceuta y Marruecos” was published in Transfretana, a journal dedicated to the particular character of Ceuta and Melilla as European border cities in the southern Mediterranean. She considers education to be the most valuable element of human life.
Pablo García Bachiller (La Línea de la Concepción, Cádiz, 1981) is an architect, trained in Valladolid and Lisbon and based in Vallecas, Madrid. His work connects architectural rehabilitation and urban regeneration with the defence of spatial rights, including the right to housing, the city and the territory, as well as with research, writing, artistic expression and social experimentation. He has collaborated with various architecture studios, worked for the city councils of Madrid, Almería, León, Valladolid and Bragança, among others, as well as with the Ministry of Culture, and has participated in European projects. He has won several public architecture and urban planning competitions, and his work has been selected by the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism. He founded the publishing house AM, wrote for z8m and Scalae, and worked on the transparency programme of the 11th Biennial. He has collaborated with various self-managed social centres in Madrid and participated in different networks. He is co-founder of the Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid, the Oficina de Urbanismo Social and the Instituto de Imaginación Radical. He has published in URBS, El Topo and collective books; his work has appeared in ArchDaily, El País, elDiario.es, El Salto and La 2. He is currently working on the rehabilitation of the Cooperativa El Pozo and other buildings in Madrid and La Línea, and participates in the IRI, whose collaboration with Pó de Vir a Ser in Raio da Raia! opens up new possibilities for relationships between culture, social movements and territory.
Andy Luengo studied Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and works as a cultural worker at the Museo Reina Sofía, in the Museo Tentacular department. Her artistic practice focuses on art as a tool for social transformation and on creating spaces for people to come together. Having experienced first-hand what it means to leave Extremadura and move to the capital, Andy asks herself from afar: do we truly nurture opportunities for creative development back home? Those who leave Extremadura but never stop inhabiting it.
Carla Magro Dias is an archaeologist, cultural manager, and researcher in Artistic Studies. She is a scientific research fellow at FCT and a doctoral candidate in the Doctoral Program in Artistic Studies—Art and Mediations at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is a collaborator at IFILNOVA, working with the CINELAB research groups. She has worked as an archaeologist and museum scientific support technician in the fields of heritage, education, and culture at various public and private organizations. More recently, as a cultural producer and programmer, she has collaborated on film, music, and public art festivals. She is currently a researcher in Artistic Studies, focusing on the intersection of cultural history and the critique of history. Her interests include art, culture, cultural policies, and communication.
Margarida Mendes is a researcher, curator and educator. Her practice explores ecological mediation, focusing on the intersection between visual arts, experimental cinema, ecopedagogy, sound practices and environmental humanities. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions, and experimental works in which modes of alternative education and listening practices can catalyze political imagination and restorative action. She has a long-standing involvement with anti-extractivist activism and eco-pedagogy, collaborating with environmental organizations, universities and institutions in the art world. Margarida has a PhD from the Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London and was a member of Natural Contract Lab, a transdisciplinary collective that works on restorative justice and rights of nature in several European rivers.
Joaquim Moreno (Luanda, 1973) is an architect and curator with an extensive body of work exploring the relationships between architecture and exhibitions, media, pedagogy, and energy. His research work is substantiated in exhibitions and accompanying books such as Radar Veneza: Portuguese Architects in the Biennale 1975-2021 (Casa da Arquitectura, with Alexandra Areia), The University is Now on Air, Broadcasting Modern Architecture (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Classroom: a Teenage View (arc en rêve centre d’architecture, CCB Architecture Centre and Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design & Architecture) and Storytelling Meters at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology. Moreno is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto and director of the Integrated Master’s Degree in Architecture.
Pat, Patricia Naharro Aguilar, is a psychologist and community facilitator. She works with associations and devotes much of her time to nurturing the social fabric of la tierrina. Proud and fortunate to have been able to remain in Cáceres, she is deeply affected by the realities of precarity: rising rents, low wages, and the exploitation of Extremadura’s natural landscapes.
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. Taring Padi is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination.
Theo Prodromidis (b. 1979, Thessaloniki) is a visual artist based in Athens. He holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, London (2007). Theo’s artistic research and practice on performativity, participation and citizenship has been activated in both institutional and nonformal spaces of knowledge, action and exhibition. His work has been presented at EMST, Galerija Nova, State of Concept, the 1st and 5th Thessaloniki Biennale and the 4th Athens Biennale a.o. His artistic research has been supported by the Greek Ministry of Culture, ARTWORKS and Onassis AiR, and he also participated, through a new production, in the project “Communities of Learning, Bridging the Gap of Isolation”, an initiative of WHW with the support of the Culture of Solidarity Fund of the European Cultural Foundation. In 2023 he was a guest artist at the Department of Public Activities of the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. For 2024-2025, he was resident artist at the ArtExplora festival in the Mediterranean and he developed a new body of work for tranzit.ro/Iași in the framework of Institution(ing)s. He is a member of the Institute of Radical Imagination and AFIELD, among others, and co-founder of Scola Society.
Rui Silva (Porto, 1981) is a graphic designer and professor. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto in 2005, where he unlearned almost everything and cultivated a fascination for everything else. Since 2007, he has had the pleasure of designing books, collaborating regularly with publishers such as Antígona, Orfeu Negro, and Dafne. In 2016, he embraced the paradigm of the Materialities of Literature, completing his Ph.D. in July 2023 with the dissertation The Condition of Being a Book: The Book as Artifact and Publishing as Artistic Practice. In 2018, he redefined his practice with Gabinete Paratextual, an experimental laboratory that critically explores design through publishing. Since September 2023, he has been a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon.
Taring Padi, MST, Casa do Povo, Framer Framed, Retomar Nosa Terra (Rebut Tanah Kita/Fight for Our Land), People’s Justice series no. 2, 2023, 450×450 cm, acrylic on canvas, photo Marteen Nauw
