Braga 25 is looking for five artistic proposals to be developed in a shopping centre in Braga. Applications are open until 31 October.
In 2025, the year in which Braga is the Portuguese Capital of Culture, the Shopyard project will energise the Santa Cruz shopping centre through a series of artistic residencies that will culminate in a final exhibition. The call for proposals for this initiative opened today, September 13, and seeks to select five artistic proposals that look at the challenges of the contemporary city and dialogue with the specificities of first-generation shopping centres.
Until the end of October, artists and creatives can apply, individually or collectively, who are born in or live in the municipality of Braga, and who work in the areas of fine arts, architecture and design. This call for proposals has a total budget of €10,000 (ten thousand euros), with support totalling €2,000 (two thousand euros) per project. This amount includes fees, production and all the necessary expenses for the project’s execution.
This initiative by Braga 25 – Portuguese Capital of Culture seeks to encourage local debate on the challenges facing contemporary cities, with a special focus on the first-generation shopping centres built in Braga between the 1980s and 1990s. Five projects will be selected to be developed as artist residencies over a two-week period between January and September 2025. Initially, the results of these short-term residencies will be presented at a public event, the aim of which will be to publicise the process of researching and creating the works. Subsequently, all the finished works will be brought together in a final exhibition, which will be held in November in various first-generation shopping centres in Braga.
Despite their privileged location in the city centre, first-generation shopping centres don’t retain the vitality and dynamism they had when they were built. With the emergence of large shopping centres on the outskirts of the city and changing consumer habits, combined with the economic crises of recent decades, most of the shops are now vacant. Even so, these spaces, planted in the city’s centre, offer unique opportunities to stimulate and encourage new cultural dynamics. It is in response to these opportunities that Shopyard was born, curated by the architectural research studio Space Transcribers.
This project is divided into a series of initiatives that focus on two programme axes – reflection and creation – which will stimulate, debate and reimagine possible futures for these shopping centres. The reflection axis will be developed from the end of 2024 and throughout 2025 through a tour of the city’s first generation shopping centres, three thought assemblies and an architecture summer school. The axis of creation will start with the transformation of a shop on the ground floor of the Santa Cruz shopping centre, which will function as the project’s headquarters and as a place of creation through workshops and the artistic residencies of this call.
Space Transcribers is an architectural research studio coordinated by architects Daniel Duarte Pereira and Fernando P. Ferreira. Based in Braga since 2015, they explore ways of collaboratively investigating, representing and imagining the built environment. Their methodology is based on immersive actions in the places and communities in which they work, using site-specific mediation and transcription tools that blur the boundaries between art and architecture. In 2023, they were one of the studios invited to take part in the Portuguese representation at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale.
Applications are open between 13 September and 31 October 2024 and can be submitted here.
The regulations can be consulted here.