The Living Atlas: Mapping Memory, Movement, and the City Beneath the Grid

Currently nomadic, temporarily grounded in Lisbon. Here, we explore how movement, memory, and public space entangle—through mapping and storytelling. Tuesday the 29th of April we have had our first presentation at Hangar. It was postponed after the massive blackout revealed just how tethered we are to digital life. As we wandered the powerless streets, we saw a quiet return to the paper map—suddenly, our method felt eerily prescient. Our obsession with maps runs deep. As a child, I was handed one on the yearly road trips down south, trying to trace the route from the back seat. It gave me bearings, agency—a feeling of control in the unknown. A quiet privilege.

Nabuurs&VanDoorn, Minor Modes of Multiple Muted Memories, 2025, digital print on vinyl

As Cristiana Tejo, curator at Hangar, noted: maps are codes—unreadable to some, like the Indigenous communities in the Amazon who navigate differently. But we come from the Low Countries, where the modern map was born. Seventeenth-century cartographers used triangulation between church towers to draw scaled street plans—tools of power during the fight for independence from Spain. A top-down logic that shaped the world. We now bring it back to groundlevel.  Through walking, mapping, and marking, we re-code experience. We inscribe ourselves into space through presence, notation, and gesture. We invite others into this lived map—a system of memory fragments, urban sketches, everyday rituals, and hollowed-out ruins, become hidden monuments to the forgotten. These traces form a temporal weave: portals to the future of the past, where perception shifts and time becomes pliable.

Minor Modes of Multiple Muted Memories installed at the outside window of Hangar, 2025

In 2005, we initiated a mail-art experiment: we asked curators, artists, and thinkers to send us one question. Pedro Lapa, curator from Lisbon asked, “When does art become autonomous from the art world?” Twenty years later, we feel a pull toward connection—toward inter-local awareness. We revisit the sites tied to the questions, mapping transitions and in-between zones. This will become a living atlas: a poetic tool to voice what usually remains unspoken. Our map draws a line between a triangulation throughout Lisbon tied to curator Pedro Lapa. The question—collected but left unresolved—now resurfaces like an archaeological find. It triangulates time: research, performance, and reactivation. This triangulation we divide into forty points. At each, we pause— we pause—marking presence with color-codes. The project finally culminates in a Game Piece performed by six instructed performers. Stepping back, enables us to examine the lenses through which we see—prejudiced, coded, inherited. What we’re mapping isn’t location—it’s perception.

Minor Modes of Multiple Muted Memories installed at the outside window of Hangar, 2025

Along the line, another question reappeared: “Who would we like to activate by answering all those questions?” asked Chus Martinez in 2005. It echoes today in 2025 now Chus curates ARCO in Lisbon. Our guerrilla approach—working in the street—is a gentle rupture. We aim to ignite something outside the art bubble. A spark. A desire. A glimpse of another world. Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” This work is our attempt to grow them.