19 and 20 September 2026
Fábrica da Criatividade, Castelo Branco
We did not set out in search of a grand utopia. Rather than imagine a system capable of answering everything, we chose to begin with the world and with what already happens in it: gestures, encounters, ways of inhabiting, places and moments of critical imagination.
It was from this starting point that the Microtopias challenge was born. We invited people of different ages, backgrounds and ways of life – artists, writers, musicians, students, neighbours, children, people used to making things and others who are rarely called upon to do so. All of them practitioners of the utopian imagination.
Each participant responded in the language closest to them: text, drawing, painting, photography, music, object, performance or any other form of expression.
Then each of them passed the same challenge on to someone else, and a second ring of participants began to grow. In this way the Microtopias spread through affinity, trust and contagion, composing an ecosystem of small possibilities.
What is now on show at Fábrica da Criatividade is neither a result nor a point of arrival. It is the moment in which a process allows itself to be revealed: a provisional cartography of questions and imaginaries keeping each other company.
And so we invite the public to stay, for the length of a sleeping night, among these works and their makers; to find their own rhythm, to talk, to rest and to discover their place among them. For the utopian imagination is always the imagination of a place.
André Barata
Programme
Microtopias took place through the night of 19 to 20 September 2026, from 4pm to 8am, at Fábrica da Criatividade in Castelo Branco. Admission was free.
4pm – Welcome and tour of the space
5pm – Serviço público (Public service), Fátima Vieira
7–11pm – Exhibition
11pm–8am – Sleeping Night
Microtopias is produced by Terceira Pessoa with the support of Fábrica da Criatividade, Castelo Branco City Council, the Portuguese Republic – Culture, Youth and Sport / Directorate-General for the Arts, Coletivo Casa Amarela and the Nuno Álvares School Cluster, Castelo Branco.
