For me, kiosks were never monuments but small rituals: the place as a kid where I spent the coins my mother gave me on candy or sticker collections. They were my first lessons in economy and responsibility, in what it meant to exchange, to spend, to choose. It even felt faintly adult, almost subversive, to slip beyond the bounds of school and visit the nearby kiosk, enacting a tiny independence with each purchase. I often wonder what they meant for others: what space did they occupy in collective imaginaries across ages and social worlds: of elders scanning the news, of workers on their lunch break, of teenagers buying their first pack of cigarettes. Yet the deeper civic role of these structures, as nodes of information, conversation and encounter, was invisible to me then, and faded further as they fell into disuse.

I grew up in Braga, Portugal, and know it intimately, but after years living abroad my familiarity has become estranged, a closeness tinged with distance. Returning now, I see both the city and its obsolete infrastructures (kiosks, half-empty malls, and others) not only as traces of personal memories but as reminders of specific social dynamics reduced to silence. To revisit them is to confront how the ordinary slips into invisibility. Yet as these older infrastructures fade, new textures of life emerge. Walking through Braga today, I hear not only Portuguese spoken in accents that were rare in my childhood (Brazilian, Cape Verdean, Guinean, Angolan) but also other languages altogether. The Brazilian community (my own country of origin) has become one of Braga’s largest migrant groups. The impacts of migration and of rising tourism are tangible, inscribed in the city’s voices, services, rhythms, prices and others factors that reshapes everyday life.To walk through Braga now is to witness how infrastructures and communities alike carry the traces of transition: what slips into obsolescence, what insists on visibility, and what reshapes the conditions of belonging.

It is within this liminal space – between affective attachment and critical distance, between infrastructures that linger as memory and those continually rewritten through change, and within the possibilities that lie in these thresholds – that I position my reflection on the project Counter-Kiosk. The project itself inhabits these very tensions: reactivating disused kiosks in Braga and turning them into stages for voices historically pushed to the margins: migrant, Roma, LGBTQIA+, Afro-descendant communities, and even more-than-human agents. The obsolete kiosks re-emerge with new civic agency, thresholds where art interrupts the flows of daily life and underrepresented presences claim visibility.

I take Counter-Kiosk not simply as an object of analysis but as a platform for speculation, an invitation to imagine what cultural practice in the public sphere might become under today’s conditions, particularly within a society where conservatism hardens, polarization silences nuance, and media saturation flattens difference into noise. Rather than treating the project as a finished gesture, I approach it as a catalyst for projection, comparison, and continuation: asking what material, symbolic, or relational infrastructures might grow from its logic, enabling complexity and empathy to take root in the civic sphere. How might such interventions give stage to marginalized voices without instrumentalizing their presence? How might they resist the traps of tokenism and instead cultivate infrastructures of reciprocity, accountability, and relation? What new institutional forms might emerge capable of engaging with their contexts and communities not through spectacle but through sustained entanglement? In this sense, the reflection is less about fixing what Counter-Kiosk has achieved than about what it gestures toward, and what it might still become.

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[Read the full text in the book Counter-Collections. Dialogues between Urban Space and Archives, 2026, eds. Fernando P. Ferreira, Daniel Duarte Pereira (Space Transcribers), published by Onomatopee.]