this project is currently in development.

                                                                                               
This project is supported by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

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.

4am – The silence of dawn takes over the landscape; few cars pass by on the avenue; the noise of a lorry unloading fruit on the street below – orange sky at dawn. What are cities for? – asks the curator, as he contemplates the morning silence of a large capital city. A silence that is never absolute: it is always pierced by noises, as if the city itself were breathing. The engine of a car, the bus that drags the day along, hurried workers, traces of night-time parties. The city never sleeps: it murmurs as it takes a last drag on a cigarette after a sleepless night.

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.

6am - Who has never woken up feeling like Sansa? Or, more precisely, like Gregor Samsa? That profound sense of being an alien in one's own skin, a monstrous vermin in the grand design of the world. It is a universal urban anxiety: to awaken not refreshed, but transformed into a creature of the margins—a cockroach in its thickest state, psyche armored yet vulnerable, instinctively mapping a retreat through the filthy, labyrinthine sewers of the city.

And so begins the day, moving through the metropolis at a specific, liminal speed—the city at medium pace. This is the velocity of the metro, neither as detached and swift as a car nor as grounded as the fastest of footsteps. It is a transient, collective rhythm, both anonymous and intimate. In this state, one feels small and everyday, yet possesses a strange, delicate agility—as precise and resilient as a cockroach's leg navigating cracks in the pavement.

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.

“We think we know what it means to feel, see, hear, and these words now pose problems. We are invited to return to the very experiences they designate in order to define them anew.” (Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty, p. 32)

The senses are reawakened through the memory of experience, and by returning to it, we can then learn from it and become skilled at transforming it. So, we invite you to return to your own experiences and evoke the sensitivity of the experience through the memory of the body in contact with the skin of cities. The intention, therefore, is not to present a theory but rather to speculate on hypotheses about what the future of cities will be, through dialogues proposed in community.

The Right to the City is a concept and slogan that emphasizes the need for inclusivity, accessibility, and democracy in urban spaces. In that sense, the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

12pm - It is lunch time. Restaurants, cafés and squares fill with hungry people. A group of workers sitting on a huge iron beam happily eat their packed lunches while watching the city from the top of a skyscraper that is still under construction. The fog blends with the clouds and the buildings look like building blocks, so small they are down there.

Many civis used the space of the city as a place to develop their thinking. In the early 1970s, for example, Gordon Matta-Clark developed his artístic practices in the context of his artistic community surrounding FOOD. Matta-Clark developed the idea of "anarchitecture"— a conflation of the words anarchy and architecture — to suggest an interest in voids, gaps, and leftover spaces. With his project Fake Estates, Matta-Clark addressed these issues of non-sites by purchasing at auction 15 leftover and unusably small slivers of land in Queens and Staten Island, New York, for $25–$75 a plot. He documented them through photographs, maps, bureaucratic records and deeds, and spoke and wrote about them — but was not able to occupy these residual elements of zoning irregularities in any other way.

3pm - 35mm - insert some pornography on any given winter afternoon. Leaving a spacious and beautiful modernist garden in the city centre, crossing the street outside the crosswalk, running past the car coming from afar, to see a photograph of yourself, completely naked, with your hand covering your buttocks, to say that you like being photographed. To present yourself in your photographed nakedness, stored inside a magazine, inside a newsstand, on Berna Avenue.

From the 1940s, Lina Bo Bardi, Italian immigrant passionate with Brazil, through an outsider perspective, developed many uses of the city observing the practice of local people and how they organized themselves in public spaces, specially in São Paulo and Bahia. By using art and popular culture as a privileged means for the development of deeply modern thinking, Lina combines ancient knowledge with new practices and affirms her attempt to ‘find a poetics within technical humanism.’ Faced with the rapid advance of what was considered modern, and therefore a certain notion of progress, she dares to reimagine the world around her and effectively construct it – bringing the aesthetic notion, both through art and architecture, as a fundamental basis for critical thinking about the reconstruction of immediate reality.

5pm - I want to give up, so I pour my coffee through the filter. I’ve become one of those people; I bought the good stuff. Where do these coffee beans come from? I watch the hot water seep through the grounds, releasing the deep, fragrant oils, each drop a promise. Is it purely psychological, or is it the chemical fist of caffeine unclenching my mind? The line is blurred, but the effect is absolute.

This ritual, so intimate and personal, began with a colonial project. When coffee first arrived in Europe in the 17th century, it was a luxury commodity, its cultivation and trade built on the backs of enslaved labor on colonial plantations. We domesticated the bean, and in turn, it domesticated us into a rhythm of productivity.

We often forget that this fundamental shake up sacrament is the administration of a drug. A legal, elegant, and socially encouraged one, but a psychoactive stimulant nonetheless. Caffeine doesn’t just wake us up; it animates the very machinery of modern life, a legacy as complex and bitter-sweet as the brew itself