The intervention by the French designer transforms the space of the charitable restaurant into an installation-kiosk promoting conviviality, meeting, and sharing, while challenging the typical idea of affordable dining.
The project’s presentation, scheduled for Friday, includes a performative lunch led by architect and food designer Anna Puigjaner, inviting participants to experience the meal as a collective ritual, merging design, gastronomy, and community.
The fourth edition of the Porto Design Biennale, curated by Italian designers Angela Rui and Matilde Losi locally with Eleonora Fedi, starts on Thursday with the opening of an exhibition as part of a program aimed at “engaging with the territory and local community.”
“The Time is Present. Invent the Common” is the theme of this fourth edition held in both cities, through a process of reflection on collective spaces, proposing “a recreational use of time and the present through design.”
In statements, local biennale curator and designer Eleonora Fedi explained that three projects in Porto and three in Matosinhos were developed with associations, designers, and local communities.
“These are very long processes; we have been working with these people since January, with volunteer sessions, many joint sessions. These local projects have this particularity, listening, being with people, spending a lot of time with them and these extended teams, to also understand how design functions as an instrument that can really help us live this common time,” she noted.
Another highlighted project is a proposal for redesigning Parques Soares dos Reis in Bonfim, which will be implemented by Porto City Hall.
“These projects aim to be very permanent. Here, we are using the slogan ‘Perhaps Forever.’ Because many of these projects will work if people appropriate the space,” emphasized Eleonora Fedi.
The theme “The Time is Present. Invent the Common” also serves as the motto for a manifesto exhibition that presents a variety of design initiatives and innovative formats, organized according to “the most participative common factor: our emotions.”
The exhibition, opening on Thursday and running at the Casa do Design in Matosinhos until March 2026, features a selection representing over 60 national and international project authors reflecting on community needs.
The exhibition reveals “how designers collectively prioritize relational, collaborative, and qualitative dimensions of the shared experience over the extractive logic of contemporary capitalism.”
This affective approach extends to editorial formats such as in “Parallaxes: Stories of the Common,” a collection of texts seeking to reveal possibilities of resistance and joy.
The main focus of this year’s edition is interventions developed in public and/or community spaces, selected from local projects by municipalities, associations, cooperatives, and movements.
These interventions, led by teams of local and international designers, developed different activities and projects aimed at permanence in the community.
“We call these interventions ‘Happisodes’ because they have a generative function, and we wish all to represent joy, hope, and collective care in building the Common,” explained the curator.
The ‘Happisodes’ are projects between designers, communities, and municipalities materialized in Porto and Matosinhos, “the joy of recognizing collectively that the present can be reimagined. They are living processes, inhabited, where design gives form to the common.”
The biennale will also launch, curated by Andreia Faria, a collection of essays and speculative fictions based on projects chosen for their “potential for resistance and joy.”
The Communoteca, a public program, will host reading groups, presentations, debates, and walks, organized by designer and editor Nina Paim, aiming to explore work, unionism, organization, and cooperativism.
The event, promoted in collaboration between the municipalities of Porto and Matosinhos and organized by esad-idea, Research in Design and Art, seeks to be a platform for dialogue between civil society, academia, industry, institutions, and national and international cultural agents.
