What can be written about the future? Anything and everything. More importantly: what do we want to bring ourselves to the future?
We invite the citizens and visitors of Porto to speak in public… in writing.
Dozens of 3-D letters were made available at Praça dos Poveiros, Porto, at the 2010 and 2011 editions of FUTUREPLACES. These letters could be re-arranged by anyone in order to make sentences and convey messages; they were moved around the space and thus materialized the individuals ideas through deconstruction, re-contextualization, reinvention. The Future thus became an endless construction of forms and content.
The challenge of engagement often took a pattern: suspicion gradually replaced by enthusiasm. The gold question to break the ice was often: “What should Porto have more of?”… and off we went.
The messages were documented and made part of an ongoing participatory online archive, where people can further continue the discussion initiated on the public landscape.
Photo contributions, among others, by Luís Barbosa and David Trullo.