this project is currently in development.
it will be shown at Platform Projects Art Fair in Athens on October 10th, 2025
and at Eulengasse Association in Frankfurt on October 15th, 2025
Initially inspired by Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities, the itinerary project Civitas – Cities in Motion, curated by Duda Affonso and JP Galvão, offers a poetic and political reflection on urban spaces. The series of exhibitions takes the city as a territory of coexistence, conflict and collective imagination, bringing together artists and exhibition spaces from different geographical locations around themes such as housing, mobility and, above all, the future of cities.
First presented in Lisbon (2024), the project makes its first tour towards Platform Projects Athens Art Fair 2025, and is then presented at the EULENGASSE association (Frankfurt). Taking on a circular and participatory format, in addition to the exhibitions themselves, the project includes visits to independent spaces, museums and local artists' studios, with the aim of building a virtual catalogue that connects artists and spaces through a new notion of globalisation considering a new world organization. By proposing a circular model of artistic dissemination that focuses not only on the art market but also on its processes and relationships, Civitas seeks to stimulate international collaboration networks, promoting a multicultural dialogue that crosses borders to rethink the cities we inhabit and how we will continue to inhabit them in the face of social, political, climatic and technological demands and transformations.
CIVITAS – Cities in Motion was born from this place of questioning. A meeting place for artists, thinkers and communities, crossing borders and languages to reflect on the present and future of cities. There are no fixed answers, but there are pressing questions. What survives in the wake of the streets, in the hidden corners of the squares, in the noises of the train stations? What cities do we dream of, what cities do we fear, what cities do we want to build together?
The word civitas defines not just the collective body of all the citizens, but the contract binding them all together, since each of them is a civis. Civitas was a popular and widely used word in ancient Rome, with reflexes in modern times. Over the centuries the usage broadened into a spectrum of meaning cited by the larger Latin dictionaries: it could mean in addition to the citizenship established by the constitution the legal city-state, or res publica, the populus of that res publica (not people as people but people as citizens), any city state either proper or state-like, even ideal, or (mainly under the empire) the physical city, or urbs. Under that last meaning some places took on the name, civitas, or incorporated it into their name, with the later civita or civida as reflexes.
The city will be perceived by us as a phenomenon and, as such, assimilated as a device that evokes diverse perspectives and where all people are invited to participate because they are capable of developing an in-depth reflection on the place to which they belong.