From 7 to 9 April 2025, the town of Mação hosted the Transformation Campus as part of the Transformative Territories project. Organised by COAL and the Instituto Terra e Memória (ITM), the event brought together local residents, artists, researchers, and international project partners (Spain, Czech Republic, Greece, Portugal, France) to explore and experiment with the synergies between art and territorial transformation.
Over three rich and intense days, workshops, artistic performances, conferences, and convivial meals followed one another, allowing participants to experiment, discuss, and evaluate transformative artistic and cultural practices.
Divided into three groups of around ten people, each guided by a member of the Transformative Territories Scientific Artistic Committee, the workshops were structured as spaces for sharing experiences among diverse participants (artists, researchers, students, local actors, and project partners). These workshops functioned as living laboratories, where bouquets of modes of action, tools, and intervention models were woven together, as resilient and vibrant as bellflowers rooted in their ecosystems. Each workshop ended with a collective presentation in the form of Ikebana arrangements, created by each group to gather and symbolise the ideas and experiences shared.
The first workshop questioned the role of art in transforming territories, not in theory but through lived experience. It examined how artists intervened; what tools they used, what objectives they pursued, and how they responded to territorial needs. Three main dimensions of transformation were identified: representations (ways of knowing and perceiving), practices (ways of acting and interacting), and structures (ways of organising and governing). Discussions also highlighted the importance of territorial diagnosis, whether conducted by the artist or based on existing data, and the shifting roles artists assumed, from scientist to urban planner to social facilitator.
The second workshop focused on the outcomes of artistic interventions and how to assess their transformative impact, given that such practices often fell outside market logics and resisted conventional evaluation tools. Three axes of evaluation were proposed: symbolic change (shifting perceptions of a territory), organisational change (restructuring relationships and power dynamics), and material change (altering the physical environment through co-creation with human and non-human actors). Participants reflected on how Transformative artistic practices generated new social contexts and micro-utopias, as well as on the need for supportive institutional and economic models. A central challenge was how to make the territorial value of Transformative artistic practices visible and shift recognition from object-based to practice-based art.
The final workshop examined strategies for fostering and sustaining public engagement in transformative practices. Central questions included: How could audiences be brought together around a territorial project? What kinds of participatory formats could generate deep involvement rather than passive observation? Discussions emphasised the creation of common, shared experiences as a counterbalance to societal fragmentation and virtualisation. Transformative artistics practices were seen as tools for building a collective ecological culture, with attention to how artists collaborated across disciplines and with communities to produce tangible effects on territories.
Alongside the workshops, the event featured performances and immersive experiences where art became a catalyst for transformation. Through sensory explorations of territories, dialogues on art’s impact, and collective experiments, these moments invited participants to rethink their relationship with the living world and the spaces they inhabit.
Performances by Yeva Kupchenko and Julie Navarro immersed the group in shared experiences through different sensory and technological forms, opening dialogues not only between human individuals but also with non-human entities, enabling new ways of sensing nature and others.
Conferences by the Tavros team, Stéphanie Sagot, Thierry Boutonnier, and Ana Marta Clemente provided the group with concrete experiences of transforming territories through art, across different geographical contexts and from multiple perspectives—those of artists, cultural spaces, and researchers.
The Transformative Campus was made possible thanks to the collaboration of a wide range of local and international partners. COAL and the Instituto Terra e Memória coordinated the event, with support from the Museum of Prehistoric Art and Sacred Art of the Tagus Valley and the Mação Town Hall. The Senior University of Mação played an important role in mobilising elder community members, while partner organisations from the Transformative Territories project—including Art Mill, Campo Adentro, Tavros, and Zone Sensible—participated in the workshops and exchanges. Local associations, volunteers, students, and educators also contributed actively throughout the days.
