30 anos a construir um lugar

30 years building a place – Oficinas do Convento

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30 years building a place

We make place.We make place with dirty hands, the sun on the roof, clay dust in the air, and the conversations that cling to our walls. For thirty years, Montemor-o-Novo has been a territory of experimentation, resistance, and invention. People have passed through here, along with techniques, heavy machines, invented machines, fragile ideas, big dreams, and works that only exist because time gave them the opportunity.

Celebrating 30 years is not looking back.It is understanding that every brick, every workshop, every lit kiln, every performance, every printed book, is the future in material form.

We are an association, but also a home.We are a school, archive, refuge, proving ground, space of waiting, trial and error, a place of fermentation for collective causes and desires. We are collective memory shaped in the hands of those who make and those who observe.

Over three decades, we have learned that art is a place that is built — slowly, with patience, with mistakes, with people. And that a place only exists while someone cares for it.

That is why, in 2026, we celebrate what cannot fit into a photograph: we celebrate processes, gestures, meetings, roots, and everything that is still to come.

Thirty years on, we still ask: *How do you make a place?*And we keep answering in the same way: *by making*.

In order to celebrate these 30 years of building together, we are launching ARQUIVO VIVO– an initiative through which we intend to create an archive that encompasses the memories of those who saw this place being created, transformed, and used, an archive that brings together the various experiences that have taken place here from the perspective of those who lived them.

We still do not know where this will take us or what the final result will be, but like everything we have done, we believe it will lead us to a place of sharing, construction, and creation. In the encounter between each of our imaginaries and lived experiences, reflecting on what we have already been able to do together, we will be able to imagine the future.

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