‘Walking is the first act of landscape construction and the first movement to think about the city. Over time, the set-foot paths become the floor of the streets – those empty lines on the maps, lines through which the city pulses in its flows of feet and paws, flows of sounds and smells, of wind and rain, the veins through which life circulates anonymously.’

Inspired by the aim of turning Évora into a creative laboratory, the Vagativus project proposes an experimental tool for (re)thinking the city. The video is the result of the transdisciplinary collective work carried out by a team of researchers during the first IN2PAST – Associated Laboratory Doctoral School, the ‘In2Future Boot Camp: Towards an Ecology of Heritage Practices’, held in Évora between May 18 and 24, 2024, in partnership with Festival Imaterial and Évora 27 – European Capital of Culture, and which brought together 33 PhD students from the seven research units that make up the IN2PAST consortium.

Vagativus begins with the challenge of thinking about the city’s absences, ‘looking to the suppression of monumental buildings to fill forgotten gaps in geographical space’. That is why our gaze is diverted downwards, ‘so that we can seek out the emotions of VAGAR’ (which is Évora_27’s motto), letting our footsteps take centre stage.

In answering the call launched by the boot camp, of (re)thinking techniques and devices of archiving, or of cultural transmission, which constitute heritage, an idea underlying the notion of anarchive, the team sought to leave the world an invitation, an appeal and an instrument to reconfigure space and rewrite the landscape, ‘privileging the city’s living arteries in the face of the devitalisation resulting from an exacerbated patrimonialisation’.

Along the way, and coming from fields of music, anthropology, landscape, literature, archaeology, architecture, history and museology, these researchers stretched their disciplinary boundaries ‘as far as possible’, realising how tensions led them to a line not to be crossed and also to that which they won’t give up on. ‘Because making art is not the same as talking about art’. The team left Évora with the certainty that new movements of creation can arise from the negotiation of boundaries.

‘Vagativus’ was first presented in public at the Garcia de Resende Theatre, in Évora, on May 24th, 2024, as part of the boot camp/Festival Imaterial’s session ‘Heritage Anarchives in Évora: Towards an Ecology of Practices’.