Our LINA choices

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Being a LINA member is an opportunity to involve new talents and boost the circulation of people with diverse backgrounds. From a total of 25 selected projects, the Triennale has chosen two finalists – a Slovenian architect and editor and an architect and artist from Lomé (Togo) living in France – for a mobile residency across Europe between their home city and Lisbon. Both will undertake a solo journey that will serve as the basis for a reflection on architecture and landscape framed by notions of border, fluidity, displacement, or heritage (both tangible and intangible) and that will underpin the creation of a sound or audio-visual piece. 

Chosen for her experience as a culture critic and editor in various media and for her work as a fiction writer (authoring a collection of short stories in 2022), Ajda Bračič starts her journey in the picturesque city of Ljubljana, more than 2000 km away from the Portuguese capital. Sustainability and adaptive reuse are some of her main interests, focusing on the intersections between architecture, identity, and language that can be found in traditional constructive knowledge, details, and techniques across different communities.

Tevi Allan Mensah, whose practice of architecture and artistic creation is divided between the imaginaries in border territories and the potential of architecture as a means of collective communication, departs from Lyon, located 1400 km from Lisbon. Previously, Allan Mensah co-founded the collective frontières* dedicated to publishing in architecture, co-created a micro-festival of architecture, Balthazar, and currently lectures in the master's chair 'Utopie/Dystopie' at ENSA Lyon. 

In this new exchange cycle, the Lisbon Triennale is committed to challenging established models by creating an on-the-move residency format. Here, the journey provides the raw material for an exercise in observation: crossing borders, experiencing territorial diversity, reducing distances, and expanding boundaries are key elements addressed in a travel journal as an essential tool for continuing education in architecture. Upon arrival in Lisbon, at the end of March, there will be a think tank that brings together Ajda Bračič and Tevi Allan Mensah with local professionals and a public debate around the results of this residency-as-periple that is part of the European programme LINA - Learning, Interacting and Networking in Architecture (more info).

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