Deadline: June 1, 2025, 11:59pm
On the occasion of the fourth edition of the Porto Design Biennale titled TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common curated by Angela Rui with Matilde Losi, designers are invited to submit their proposals as part of the exhibition in Casa do Design in Matosinhos.
How many times you “didn't have time”?
Yet time exists and saying we don't have it implies that time doesn't belong to us, becoming the only form of luxury many of us can aspire to.
The ancient Greeks distinguished between two forms of time: Chronos—quantitative time, the time of clocks—and Kairos—qualitative time, connected to a sense of occasion.
Since then, Chronos has been the main reference to identify time in everyday life, leaving apart Kairos, that qualitative time connected to leisure activities and a sense of occasionality.
In the past, the 8-hour working day was designed to regulate the time to work and the time to leisure and rest, whilst today, despite the loss of that separation, we have not lost the imperative of quantifying time. This specific attitude is what has produced the current conditions of planetary depletion of bodies, resources, and the Earth itself—all unpacked in their utilitarian functions according to the laws of efficiency and turbo-capitalism.
We are immersed in a culture of quantity (Chronos) that acts as a disqualification of quality (Kairos). By objectifying the world through time, its sensible qualities have been set aside, and all the activities that do not produce capital—i.e. everything that concerns care for people, for other species, for the environment, for the world we would like to live in—are perceived as not valuable, creating a feeling of anxiety and non-futurability.
TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common invites for a shift in our daily perspective.
What would happen if we would also start observing the potential of qualitative time? Maybe the present would not be seen as a crisis to overcome but rather as a dimension filled with collective possibilities waiting to be activated. This perspective fully inhabits the now and suggests the importance of reclaiming time as a common resource — a gift that belongs to all, a condition for belonging, a present of presence.
This vision frames design as collective world-building, intended as an active, ongoing, down-to-earth engagement with the materiality of the present, where the collective capacity to shape systemic relations becomes both medium and subject, taking the design discipline beyond the idea of a future-oriented or problem-solving practice. Here, "the common" expands from shared resources to embrace a fundamental dimension of social production that includes material elements alongside language, knowledge, affects, relationships, and of course, trust.
Therefore, assuming time as a shared resource and design as a political practice, the biennale becomes a platform that moves from functioning as an institution to operating instead as a constitution—a living process that actively produces new and lasting social relations, forms of organization, and modes of collaboration.
With these intentions, the exhibition TIME IS PRESENT. Designing the Common presents itself as a testing-playground for transdisciplinary projects and practices of spatial justice capable of designing objects, places, activities, and processes able to vitalise collective and associative realities, guaranteeing them long-term agency thanks to the belief that design is oriented towards the shared well-being of living beings and their environment, and vice versa.
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Read the full curatorial text.
For further information, please contact esadidea@esad.pt
