Periple Duet

In this new exchange cycle, the Lisbon Triennale is committed to challenging established models by creating an on-the-move residency format. 

For the first Periple Duet, we have invited a Slovenian architect and editor and an architect and artist from Lomé (Togo) living in France for an itinerary across Europe between their home city and Lisbon. Both will undertake a solo journey that serves as the basis for a reflection on architecture and landscape framed by notions of border, fluidity, displacement, or heritage (both tangible and intangible). The main rule is that their means of transportation cannot include airplanes. The journey provides the raw material for an exercise in observation and underpins the creation of a sound or audio-visual piece. 

Upon arrival in Lisbon, there will be a public debate at Lisbon Triennale’s HQ bringing together Ajda Bračič and Tevi Allan Mensah around the experience and results of their travelogue. 

This brief will be repeated for the three year duration of the project in a collection of emerging views of the European geopolitical contemporary context.

Collaboration with LINA fellows

Ajda Bračič was 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). 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. These themes are in line with our regular programme in between editions of the international festival. 

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. 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. His experience and areas of interest are are added value to the challenge.