Possible Imaginaries

Curated by Paula Melâneo, Pedro Bandeira, and Luca Martinucci, the project presents two interconnected paths: an immersive multimedia installation that blends sound, image, and space, and an Atlas of images capturing the Portuguese landscape through themes of experience, regeneration, and cultural transformation.

A definition of paradise
Etymologically, “paradise” once meant an ordered, enclosed garden separated from worldly chaos. Today, that boundary has vanished, transforming into an illusory perimeter where well-being’s promise collides with ecological crises, growing inequalities, and irreversible territorial changes. The project emerged from a provocative question: “If Nature is Paradise, what purpose does architecture serve?” We sought to deconstruct paradise as an ideal, unassailable place, reimagining it as a mobile, ambivalent structure traversed by political, emotional, and spatial tensions – a critical device oscillating between utopia and simulacrum. In Portugal, this ambiguity is starkly visible: luminous coastal tourism images coexist with land speculation and exploitation. As the country’s interior gradually empties of voices and presence, Paraíso, hoje. views architecture as a potential cultural agent capable of creating more conscious, critical, and generous ways of inhabiting space.

Tools to analyse Portugal’s natural, built-up, and social territory
We deliberately avoided rigid disciplinary filters and conventional urban planning grids, instead approaching the territory as we were making a film, reading the landscape as a living construct of memories, conflicts, and desires. This approach generated two parallel paths: the Machine-Device and the Atlas. To build the Atlas, we invited Portuguese photographers to open their archives, seeking images that could evoke possible paradise concepts. This dialogue with those who observe and represent territory became our foundational gesture, creating a shared visual grammar within the curatorial group. We also launched an open call to collect diverse perspectives on paradise’s meaning. The gathered material doesn’t propose solutions but creates a visual constellation of analogies and resonances. The Atlas is an evolving device, with its first volume (N1) containing over 700 uncaptioned images. Texts are in a separate booklet, allowing images to dialogue without hierarchies. We invited three authors – António Guerreiro, Nuno da Luz, and Maria Manuel Oliveira – to contribute reflections that create dissonance and interviewed four landscape architects whose vision helps interpret the Portuguese landscape’s destiny. Finally, with Catarina Raposo and Nuno Cera, we mapped locations at once generic and specific, embodying the sensitive ambiguity of contemporary Portuguese landscape, which were filmed and sampled to feed the “machine’s” visual system.

Portugal’s status quo and perspectives
The device is an integral part of the installation. Our “sensitive machine” is a system that reacts to the visitor’s presence, transforming each visit into a unique experience. The observer becomes an actor, with their gaze and body triggering a living dialogue with space and images. Nuno Cera’s videos, shot across Portuguese territories, showcase real landscapes digitally transformed by 18—25 Research Studio’s AI. The landscapes that emerge are utopian, dystopian, poetic, and unsettling, always traversed by a critical tension softened by subtle irony, inviting awareness rather than moral condemnation. The visual landscape intertwines with Jorge Queijo’s soundscape, translating the ambiguous vibration of these places between fascination and unease, nostalgia and premonition. The audience stands at the centre of the scene. Visitors alter the work’s progression through interaction with the “machine”, creating a performative, transformative space. We used technology not to create sterile wonder, but to activate a perceptive space that changes with its inhabitants. The installation becomes a theatrical mise en abyme. Transparent from outside, the glasses become mirrors from within. Reality reflects, duplicates, and deforms.

Renzo Piano said that architecture is shaped by needs
Renzo Piano’s statement is true, but today’s needs extend far beyond basic requirements like housing and infrastructure. In consumer society, architecture has become just another product, comparable to a financial asset subject to speculation. We wanted to demonstrate that architecture can exist without building, as an instrument to observe, understand, and imagine. Responding to Carlo Ratti’s challenge of “One place, one solution”, we argue that solutions transcend mere technical approaches. They are rooted in sensitivity, in ways of perceiving and interpreting reality. Architectural design is more than a blueprint for construction; it is a cultural definition of landscape – an act that names, interprets, and ultimately shapes its destiny.

Portugal’s direction
Our Pavilion doesn’t aim to speak about Portugal, but to speak through Portugal. The theme of paradise – and its collapse – is no longer a national issue, but a planetary one. With Europe, we must construct a shared grammar to rethink how we inhabit, represent, and preserve territory. In this scenario, Portugal can offer a sensitive perspective that unites visual culture, memory, and landscape. However, it must also confront the ever-present threat of its own exoticization.

New dimensions for architecture, according to you
Paraíso, hoje. presents architecture as a sensorial and critical device. We create not just objects, but perceptive conditions, imaginaries, and questions. Here, architecture becomes a scenography that invites introspection, responsibility, and participation. We aimed to demonstrate that architects can be curators, narrators, directors, and ecologists – that architecture can act without building, working through imagination, care, revelation, and politics.

Featured image: Curatorial Team © Francisca Branco