participatory projects
Festival Desejar
Braga 25: Capital of Portuguese Culture
At the invitation of Braga 25, the capital of Portuguese culture, and Colectivo Til, we joined the Desejar assembly, monthly meetings held among interested citizens to imagine ways of conceiving what an itinerant assembly could be, with the aim of bringing it to fruition during the Desejar Festival in June 2025.
There were several workshops in which we discussed being and existing in a city, forms of belonging, management, horizontality, and participation. How does an assembly move and promote encounters? How does an assembly welcome different sides and act as a bridge? How are voices amplified in the urban context?
The exercises also included urban and playful drifting devices, permeating memories, affections, and sensations, as well as collaborative workshops in which construction possibilities were taught with the primary objectives of doing things together and listening to everyone.
Finally, a modular space was built collaboratively and hosted the Desejar program, which featured performative, sound, and visual experiences organized by residents of Braga and its surroundings.
Lisbon and Braga, Portugal, 2024-2025
photos from personal collection and taken in partnership with Festival Desejar
Play Spaces
Cooperê POA, Pirituba and Guaianases
Cooperê is a project by the company ErêLab, which develops play equipment and play spaces, valuing children as the protagonists of their own experiences and seeking to highlight the importance of activity in relation to aspects such as physical and emotional health.
The methodology is a triangulation of public, private and civil society actors. Through the Cooperê platform, communities signed up in search of living spaces for resident children, so we brought together private partners willing to finance the equipment and liaised with the public sector, city halls and sub-prefectures, to not only make the space legal, but also to get support for structural changes, such as crosswalks, lighting, cleaning and water points.
The initial contacts with the communities went hand in hand with the territorial study, i.e. while we held the workshops in an attempt to understand which space would be the most suitable for the children, their wishes and needs, we also assessed the local possibilities that would guarantee the most accessible playground possible.
The workshops were aimed at children and, although they were a priority, we also talked to families and community players who saw the possibility of playing as a benefit for the whole surrounding community.
Cooperê already has a few projects, and my participation as a manager, architect, urban planner and mediator took place in Vila dos Papeleiros, in Porto Alegre (which was reported on national television), Xurupita Comunity, in Pirituba and in Guaratiba Park, in Guaianases, both in Sao Paulo.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2021-2022
photos from personal collection and taken by Bibiana Tini and Roni Hirch
Canivete Park Workshop
Under the guidance of Karina Leitão, the installation of lambes in Parque do Canivete, Brasilândia, Sao Paulo, was an attempt to provide the means for children and women living in the neighborhood to feel a greater sense of participation and belonging.
Initially, as an all-female group, our proposal was to try to build links with some of the community's residents so that safety in public and private spaces could be discussed, especially with regard to micromobility in stairwells and alleys, which are very present in the area, and so that we could find some mechanism together, whether it was infrastructure or public demonstration, that would make them recognize the area as theirs. We were thinking about appropriation.
Some affective cartography workshops and conversation circles were held at the Children and Adolescents Art on the Street, the Jardim Damasceno House of Culture and the Brasilândia Women's House, where women and children came together in search of another way of being in the public space and found in an artistic manifestation, together with a big celebration, a first way of identifying themselves with the space they inhabited.
collaboration: Barbára Muhle, Bianca Brigati, Bruna Martins, Tainá Toscani and Tatiana Scholz and Coletivo MOVA
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2017
photos from personal collection and taken by the collaborators
