Activating the Living Atlas by Motion

We return to Lisbon through movement, not perception.

What began as a line drawn across the Lisbon map—a cartographic incision—has now unfolded across the city in gestures, pauses, and improvisations. Each of the eleven locations activated in this video is a node from Minor Modes of Multiple Muted Memories, a walk we performed, documented, and coded with colors, spells, words, and collages. Now, those codes return to the city not as symbols, but as motion—through the body of breakdancer Timo Paris.

With the green protocol in hand, Timo navigates the city like a fluent reader of its unseen language. Curbs become instruments. Shadows become cues. Surfaces resonate. What we once recorded as affective traces, he now reinterprets as choreographic structure. His body moves in and out of architectural rhythm, finding new beats in the overlooked.

We—Nabuurs&VanDoorn—guided, documenting each site not through detachment but through the lens of another protocol: the purple one. Originally intended for a journalist or digital content creator, we inhabited this role ourselves, activating the documentation as a performance in its own right.

In the video, each location is marked by its corresponding color-code-card, signaling a temporary transformation of public space into a speculative playing field. These markers act like coordinates in an emotional geography—each moment of movement a response to accumulated memories, layered histories, and shifting urban poetics.

Timo’s physical engagement with the environment revealed something to us. After twenty years of working in public space, we witnessed the city anew through his embodied knowledge. Benches, poles, ledges—elements we’ve passed countless times—suddenly announced themselves as choreographic props.

And something else became clear: public space is not neutral. The way it receives a breakdancer differs radically from how it responds to an artist. The former is welcomed, cheered on, even celebrated. The latter is often questioned, resisted, misunderstood. Street sport reads as belonging; high art, as intrusion, as alien.

This performative experiment opened a new chapter: a living archive in progress, where site, body, memory, and documentation fold into one another. It is not just about performance—it’s about the performativity of presence. About how we look, how we move, and who is allowed to move how—and where.

What we present here is not a final piece, but a beginning. An atlas that moves, bends, dances—always in relation to the city that holds it.

Left: Green protocol 2 for Dance, 2025, mixed media on paper, 14,8 x 21 cm Right: Timo Paris performing green protocol 2