Interspecies Gathering

10:30am – Welcome by Nuria Enguita, Artistic Director at MAC/CCB
Introduction to the Interspecies Gathering by Mariana Pestana, exhibition curator
Location: Architecture Centre

10:45am – Liquid Alliances workshop with Margarida Mendes
Max. 15 participants | Ages 16+ | Location: Belém, walk along the Tagus River
Meeting point: Architecture Centre | In Portuguese | Free admission, subject to prior registration 

Taking the Tagus estuary as a meeting ground for multiple species and communities, this workshop draws on environmental activism to imagine what a process of restorative justice for the river might look like.

By highlighting the role of wetlands and river systems in ecosystem renewal, participants will explore—through direct observation and diagrammatic exercises—how protecting these spaces could foster richer, more reciprocal ways of living.

Bringing together empirical observations, scientific research, and accounts from local residents, the workshop will create space for dialogue between science and activism, offering new perspectives on how estuarine cohabitation might strengthen intergenerational bonds more equitably.

10:45am – Guided tour of Interspecies with Mariana Pestana and the Interspecies Research Studio
In English | Location: Architecture Centre

11:45am – Public presentation of the Diogo Seixas Lopes Creative Grant – Columba Livia Sp. Domestica: Critical Agent for Decoding Spatial Policies, by FIELD
In English | Location: Architecture Centre

12:15pm – Public presentation of the Diogo Seixas Lopes Creative Grant – Roots and Routes, by Frame Colectivo
Location: Architecture Centre

12:45pm – Break

2:30pm – Meditation at 7.8Hz by Michael Marder with musical composition by Maxwell Sterling
In English | Location: Architecture Centre

In this iteration of Meditation at 7.8 Hz, participants are invited to accept their bodies and the gravitational forces that shape corporeality. Grounding oneself in the body becomes a way of experiencing it as living mass and feeling the weight one is, rather than the weight one carries.

Originally created for the Meditation at 7.8 Hz programme, curated by Mariana Pestana for Carsten Höller’s exhibition DIA at MAAT in 2022. Included on the LP co-produced by MAAT and the record label Holuzam.

3:00pm – Computational Compost, by Marina Otero Verzier
In English  | Location: Architecture Centre

Computational Compost addresses the environmental impact of data and proposes a synergy between technology and ecology. Through metabolic processes, it connects the sheer computational energy required to decipher the mysteries of life’s origin with the terrestrial processes that renew it. As supercomputers simulate the universe’s genesis and expansion, the heat they generate leads to irreversible changes, affecting organic life through cycles of composition and decomposition. These processes intertwine vast cosmic timelines with computational and earthly dynamics, positioning data storage architectures beyond a human-centric perspective.

3h30pm: Break

3:45pm – Unnatural Alliances, by Godofredo Pereira
In English | Location: Architecture Centre

Anti-extractivist struggles across the world are being waged to defend existential territories and more-than-human ecologies against the digging machines of capitalism. On a journey from the Atacama desert to the Barroso mountains, Anomalous Alliances will explore the environmental architectures at the heart of these struggles, and how they catalyse the weaving of alliances between the living, the dead, and the non-living, between the human, the non-human, and the more-than-human, between spirits, ancestors, and roots, between stones, mountains, and microbes.

4:15pm – How to Think with Germinating Seeds?, by Michael Marder
In English | Location:  Architecture Centre

How to re-learn the work and the play of thinking from plants? I propose shifting the focus and perspectives of our thought and attention from the extremes to the middle, whence the extremes emerge and develop in their tireless interplay. Rather than commence with the earth and the sky—that is, with the elemental and metaphysical terrestrial and celestial grounds of vegetal life arranged in definite hierarchical formations—starting in the middle that is the seed is following the seed’s own trajectories, whether of germination or non-germination. My wager is that it will be possible to glean surprising implications from such an exercise for the practice of human thinking, which would be of a piece with and conducive to life.

4:45pm: Break

5:00pm – Roundtable with Godofredo Pereira, Mariana Pestana, Marina Otero Verzier, Margarida Mendes, and Michael Marder

In English | Location: Architecture Centre

6:00pm – Inauguration of the Superflex + KWY.studio and Studio Ossidiana interventions

Location: Jardim da Água and Jardim das Oliveiras