ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere

ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins*

Lesson #6
InterStruct Collective, Mapping Decolonial Paths
Today we returned to our school, Pedro Ivo Public Library, at the Marquês Garden, from which we stayed away the past few days because of the rain. As we returned, we were surprised with the booklet of the school ready and waiting for us. It gathers every radical map by the cartographers invited by the School at the Edge of Nowhere, together with their texts and biographies, and the essays by Jorge Ricardo Pinto and the project curators, Joclécio Azevedo and Inês Moreira. But before going back to Marquês, we paid a visit to another garden in the city, that of Palácio de Cristal.
This class was mentored by two members of the InterStruct collective, Desirée Desmarattes and Vijay Patel, and consisted of a field trip with a playful component. InterStruct sets out to map the traces of colonialism in the city of Porto left by a historical period that was celebrated in several ways and remains in the city’s imaginary and landscape. One of the most significant celebratory events was the 1934 Primeira Exposição Colonial Portuguesa [First Portuguese Colonial Exhibition], which took place in Porto, by decision of António de Oliveira Salazar and Henrique Galvão, inspector of the colonial administration, at Palácio de Cristal and the surrounding garden, which were transformed for that purpose. InterStruct brought us there following a selection of hidden milestones, organised into six categories that guided the visit: capitalism, propaganda, discrimination, reparation, science and public space.
The InterStruct collective was formed in 2017. While it is based in Porto, it is composed entirely of international members. Its goal is to establish a collaborative platform where interculturalism may allow for a speech approach, interventions and projects that are adjusted to the setting where they take place in a way that is disruptive concerning ideological and political preconceptions. In this particular case, they adopted a model that is simultaneously educational (introducing and providing background to historical facts of the Portuguese colonial exhibition along the way), playful (suggesting little games during and after the visit, when we returned to the Public Library), and emotional (every step the participants were asked to express themselves in different ways—performing, visual, oral—on the historical and social settings being presented to them).
Once we returned to the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere, the class incorporated its insights into the board of the Decolonial Paths game, so that InterStruct carries on its critical and systemic mapping and dismantling of references associated with colonialism and respective nationalisms.

*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.