BEATRIZ DUARTE
Site em construção
Arquinho’s Takeovers
Coordination: Beatriz Duarte
Participants: Ana Rocha, Cristianne Melo, Flora Paim, Martín Hernández Molín
Location: Fábrica do Arquinho (Porto, Portugal)
2023
spatial practices; mediation; curating
The Takeovers at Arquinho emerged from an encounter with an abandoned textile factory in Guimarães. Unlike other contexts, the space offered no structured archive, no consolidated narrative, and only fragmentary material traces of its industrial past. Faced with this absence, the project asked an open question: how can an archive be constructed from a place that does not clearly remember itself?
To explore this, the site was temporarily occupied by a group of artist-researchers, activating it as a field of investigation. Rather than documenting the space, the Takeovers proposed an experimental, situated approach to archiving, grounded in fragments, material residues, and dispersed memories.
A Map of Concerns was shared as a starting point, not to explain the site, but to unsettle it. Composed of images, notes, and questions, the map oriented attention toward multiple layers of the space, including the invisible river, spontaneous vegetation, and its industrial condition in transformation.
Within this framework, each artist developed their own mode of engagement. Some worked through narrative and speculation, others through material assemblage, performance, or processes of transformation. Across these approaches, the archive did not appear as a fixed collection, but as something provisional, unstable, and continuously produced in relation to the site.
The Takeovers thus reposition the archive as a practice: not a repository of the past, but a way of thinking, sensing, and composing with what remains. The results of this encounter were exhibit at the exhibition Ruins and Fragments .