The 4th Edition of the Porto Design Biennale, held in Portugal in 2025 under the theme TIME IS PRESENT: Designing the Common, transcends traditional dichotomies by emphasising everyday gestures and actions as essential to social mobilisation. Drawing upon the curators’ insights, and our collaboration with Casa do Design, the venue hosting the Biennale’s central exhibition, this presentation engages with the tensions inherent in Derrida’s question of hospitality. How do artistic projects cultivate ongoing processes of hospitality within lived realities that change our social awareness? Through the examination of two case studies from the Biennale’s Love and Listen sections, we explore how openness to the ‘other’ allows a re-evaluation of the terms ‘stranger’ and ‘host’. These contemporary cultural practices foreground more-than-human environments, challenging prevailing structures and narratives. The sound installation High Voltage Waggle Dance (2022-24) and the film and project After Hours (2025) highlight the intertwined relationships with electromagnetic signals perceptible to bees, as well as alterations in the nocturnal cycles of animals and humans caused by extractive agriculture in southern Portugal. The Biennale’s framework prioritises co-design initiatives that engage citizens’ sensibilities and presence, revealing diverse situations that demand openness to alternative forms of agency and temporalities. This performative approach embraces practices as situational processes unfolding over time, generating meaning and subjectivities through cooperation rather than static representation or fixed analysis. It involves inhabiting and enacting problems and cultural forms, thereby allowing knowledge and projects to emerge from an ongoing relational process.

Authors:
Maria João Baltazar, College of Art and Design Matosinhos, Portugal

About the Presenter(s)
Dr Maria João Baltazar is a Lecturer in Artistic Studies, Visual Culture, and Design History at the College of Art and Design (ESAD), Portugal, and a full member of the esad–idea research centre.

See this presentation on the full schedule – Monday Schedule

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