Contra-Coleções: Dialogues between Urban Space and Archives will be presented next Thursday, 30 April, at 6:30 pm at Livraria Centésima Página, in Braga. The project by Space Transcribers is published by the Dutch publisher Onomatopee Projects and by Faz Cultura – Empresa Municipal de Cultura de Braga.
How can collections and archives transform the stories cities tell about themselves? This question underpins Contra-Coleções: Dialogues between Urban Space and Archives, a publication emerging from the Contra-Quiosque project, developed by Space Transcribers as part of Braga 25 Portuguese Capital of Culture.
Between March and June 2025, five disused kiosks across the city of Braga were reactivated as temporary exhibition spaces, bringing together art, architecture, collections and local communities often absent from official urban narratives.
For each kiosk, an artist-researcher connected to the relevant themes and communities was invited: Emília Rigová, Hilda de Paulo, Maria Trabulo, Marta Pinto Machado and Miguel Teodoro. The architectural rehabilitation of the kiosks was led by architect António Pedro Faria.
One of the publication’s central axes is a reflection on the role of small and medium-sized cities in producing alternative urban narratives. While major capitals tend to concentrate and stabilise cultural and architectural debates around emerging issues—such as migration, post-colonialism, LGBTQIA+ rights or the climate crisis—cities like Braga offer particularly fertile ground for critically engaging with these themes, in tension with dominant narratives and so-called official histories.
Contra-Coleções proposes that the urban space of such cities can pioneer new ways of reclaiming, discussing and making visible counter-narratives around the struggles and aspirations of often underrepresented communities.
This book expands the gesture of the Contra-Quiosque project, proposing the collection not as something static, but as a living, collaborative and critical practice. The publication places the five artists involved in the Braga 25 project in dialogue with artists and thinkers from other geographies: Thandi Loewenson (United Kingdom), Rafael Guendelman Hales (Chile), Mihaela Drăgan (Romania), Caio Jade (Brazil) and Cooking Sections (United Kingdom/Italy). Through these dialogues, as well as visual essays and critical texts, themes such as migration, memory, post-colonialism, Roma feminism, ecology and trans studies intersect.
The volume also includes a critical essay by curator Bruno Alves de Almeida and a text by architectural historian and critic Jane Rendell.
Launch event
The launch will take place on 30 April at 6:30 pm at Livraria Centésima Página (Casa Rolão, Av. Central, no. 118–120, Braga).
The session will include a presentation of the book by the editors and a reading and response session featuring Chisoka Simões (CECS, University of Minho), Tatiana Mendes (UMAR Braga), Elaine Vianna (Movimento Poesie-se), Maria Gil (actress and Roma activist) and Carlos Rosário (INL).
Free entry.
About Space Transcribers
Fernando P. Ferreira and Daniel Duarte Pereira are architects and researchers. Under the name Space Transcribers, they develop projects at the intersection of architecture, curatorship and artistic research. As part of Braga 25 Portuguese Capital of Culture, they conceived three projects: Forma da Vizinhança, Contra-Quiosque and Shopyard.