Future Archaeologies
In the context of Braga 25 Portuguese Capital of Culture, the Forma da Vizinhança Festival, curated by Space Transcribers, invited eight architectural teams to intervene in eight places across the city, proposing a reflection on ways of inhabiting public space and on the role of communities in its transformation. The urbanization of Fujacal became the territory of work and listening.
Two signs guided the project: the encounter with a spontaneous garden in the centre of Arsenalistas Square, cultivated by a neighbour—evidence that public space is renewed through silent gesture and daily care—and the process of geological and cartographic research, which revealed the presence of clay in the subsoil: the mineral memory of a deep time, a material capable of sustaining new forms of neighbourhood.
From this double recognition—human gesture and soil matter—Archaeologies of the Future was born, an intervention that transformed the square into a greenhouse-laboratory, a space for experimentation, encounter, and collective creation.
The project began with the gesture of excavation. In the mineral core of the square, an archaeological site was demarcated, where potential artefacts were sought. Tables, benches, bookshelves, a muffle furnace, and a tub composed an essential space, open to workshops, meetings, and experiences centred on clay.
The construction and activation of the installation became, in themselves, an exercise in proximity. Throughout the festival, ceramic workshops led by local ceramists and open to the community brought together knowledge and stories, shaping objects that functioned simultaneously as personal testimonies and collective remains.
In the end, the structures were dismantled, the ground regularised, and the square returned to its original form. What remained, however, were the vestiges of a living archive of collective experience.
Archaeologies of the Future proposed creating, in the present, a legacy for the future: an anticipated archaeology made of clay and encounters, celebrating shared construction, shaping new neighbourhood narratives, and sedimenting gestures in common memory.
