The national journey HODO: Unique Journeys brought a group of students together to design an installation whose intention is to "make one stop," countering the progressive contemporary acceleration. The resting assembly proposes to visitors the practice of an activity invented for the needs of our time, a place for "restivity." A circular space, simultaneously open and secluded, for an assembly of people who, in (in)active contemplation, can claim the right to pause, activating a desire for stillness in space and perhaps in time.
Identifying as a local and global urgency the "rare" act of actively and consciously slowing down or stopping, and evoking the well-known empathetic nature of the Portuguese in their gestures of hospitality, for Portugal's official representation in the STUDENTS section in Prague, a place was conceived that promotes the gathering of "activist-pausers" — a network of present and awake people, connected to themselves, to each other, and to the (same) space where they find themselves.
This is a space for the gathering of (in)active bodies, a place for deep time, which therefore requires slow actions and unhurried drawings. A receptacle for suspended, levitating bodies, in permanent construction and (e)laboration, where "doings," decisions, and journeys intersect — paths woven by the verb to weave. An installation where the weft that makes the fabric becomes a web and, over the days, becomes a net, a bed, a cocoon, a mesh, a weave.
Through a slow performative scenography, the work unfolds in space and time, expands and amplifies, transfigures itself, allows unpredictable reconfigurations through the materiality of the space activated by the presence of its occupants and the accumulation of PQ's days. We thus propose a practice of encounters and occupations capable of performing new worlds and transforming, activating, debating, critiquing, and proposing (more) profound temporalities, through the complex act — as difficult as it is potentially productive — of stopping.
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