The aim of ‘A Vila da Mañá’ is to change the model of town or city, we believe that another one can be possible. This is achieved through the protagonist participation of local children and adolescents who, by working with fundamental concepts through tactical urban planning actions, become active citizens capable of transforming their spaces.

In this case, the village is worked on, like its habitat, its game board to be discovered. Understanding its structure, conformation, morphology, its voids and its fillings, its history, its traditions, and its symbolic and immaterial issues is essential to be able to reflect on how they move from one site to another, the routes, the points important where the lives of the girls, boys and teenagers of the community develop.

“The purpose of art is to impart the feeling about things as they are perceived instead of as they are known (or conceived). The “find objects strange” technique of art, of making forms difficult, of increasing the difficulty and magnitude of perception is not aesthetic as an end itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the quality or artistic essence of an object; the object is not the important thing. ”

Viktor Shklovski

To understand how the inhabitants, both current and future, perceive their town, we will use the following strategy: we set off ‘adrift’ with a large golden frame, so that during our wandering, we frame those urban elements that are important to them (an experience based on the work of O’Grady). Who have been the protagonists of this ‘A Vila do Mañá’ experience? On this occasion, during their wandering, they have reDISCOVERED places in their town, perhaps forgotten ones.

With ‘A Vila do Mañá’, the village in which they live is not an abstract idea, nor a series of small partial images; it begins to be understood as a much more complex and expansive environment, bringing us closer to the notion of habitat: the space that transcends its physical location in a territory where we fulfil our needs, establishing relationships with others and with the environment, both natural and built; involving processes in which it transforms, but in which we are also transformed.

Work begins with PERCEPTION. How do the future inhabitants of the place perceive their village or city? To explore this, participants are invited to use simple drawings to show us which elements they consider fundamental or particularly interesting in their village or city. In this way, we can understand their individual views of the place they live in and begin to build a collective vision shared by all participants.