A festival like DDD is in itself a massive structure, held by mostly culture workers and artists, hosted by the city of Porto’s main public theatre, which provokes production and development of new artistic expressions, invites artists from near and far, and which requires a positionality towards its representatives that is perhaps, beyond us to properly comprehend within the limited time we have.

As we dive into the - mostly digital, mostly internal - archive of DDD Festival, we start at a literal and figurative crossroads, an encruzilhada of paths that have, with time, shown themselves to us. We are, at the end of the day, commissioned thinkers who inhabit this programme for a short space of time, and even if working from within that structure, we still sit outside of it in many ways. For instance, we do not have access to full documentation of all performances and public talks, nor do we have access to sit in programming and finance meetings to understand how decisions were made. Decisions that have come to impact the local cultural scene as much as anything, for this is a festival and a theatre that are run in proximity with the local council (as so many are across Portugal). 

At performingborders, we always try to cross the lines between critical thinking of art production and the material conditions of how said art happens. When the invitation came to look at the DDD archive which spans the 10 years of the festival, we felt a responsibility to not only engage with what is available to us, but also with what is missing from it. By missing we don’t mean things that got lost in the ephemeral nature of performances presented, or programme booklets, photography and documentation that require new rights agreements to be shown. We mean what, and who, is not in it, what narratives have not been included and what conditions have artists worked with over the years. 

This position affords us an arms-length approach that we can inhabit, to look at the festival and its infrastructure as a whole, from a semi-outside perspective. By infrastructure here we mean as much the various structures that the festival exists in as well as the social political context and the conditions the festival and its working forces operate in.

“(...)infrastructure is inseparable from the attempt to develop a materialist theory of “conditions.” This means the material conditions of the institution’s reproduction, both in and beyond the art field. (...) a theory that doesn’t rely on idealist philosophical paradigms and yet can simultaneously attend to the so-called historical and social ontology of art. Beyond this, it needs to engage with the space of social struggle and organizing, the field of work, and everything that the field conceals or excludes, both within and beyond its own institutional environment. At its far limit, it should also be able to deal with questions of social abstraction, which also means with colonialism and race.” (Marina Vishmidt, ‘Infrastructural Critique: Between Reproduction and Abolition” (June 2025)

Over its’ 10 year course, the festival has positioned itself as a space for the creation of contemporary dance, in all its variations and forms, with an eye to programme and develop artists from the city over time, as well as showcasing international talent. Like any major festival that is part of the international dance scene, it has showcased, launched and/or commissioned unavoidable names such as Tânia Carvalho, Vera Mantero and Jeremy Nedd as well as given space and resources to new local artists who transgress and experiment with the art form. This year, for instance, artists like Afrontosas, Diana Niepce, and shows like Tender Riot, are pushing the boundaries of what collective performance can be, at different scales. The latter, for instance, speaks of a generation that is at the intersection of a need to demolish capitalist hegemony while rejecting the very nature of what might make that possible: structural and communal violence. A look at this year’s festival marketing campaign (for instance its Instagram account) focuses on reflective interviews of artists who have over the years been impacted and/or who have been part of the festival, across the city. Clearly the festival is, both in its positionality and in its intentions, a festival that creates relations of proximity and complicity with its artists and the cities it operates in Porto, Vila Nova de Gaia and Matosinhos. 

Such an approach to programming allows us to look not only at the relevance of the festival and its programming, but also at just how it shaped (and has been shaped by) an ever developing hosting city. It is safe to say that Porto, specifically, has been a site of transformation over the past ten years, with property development disrupting the very fabric of communities and cultural norms like never before, gentrification and mass tourism re-shaping both the architecture of the city and the memory of it. As the festival grew, looking at internationality in its intentions, so did the city alongside it. The centre of the city and the cultural structures that exist in it, have shifted focus over the years as well to accommodate this change. The long-loved Maus Hábitos, one of the most impactful and initially DIY artists-run spaces in the centre of Porto, is now changing to be mainly a bar and restaurant for those visiting the city, its gallery and performance space no longer of use to the demands of an ever more capital-gourging city. RAMPA, a collectively-run space in the tourism-centered Bolhão area, has had to move from the centre to a warehouse in Campanhã, no longer so easily accessible to most. Its original space is now rented for private events. The more the city internationalises itself, the more venues close and artists move to the outskirts. But as the concrete blocks of buildings rise and the nature of the city changes with it, what is left behind and who gets to experience (and make) the contemporary dance the festival programmes? What continues to be part of the history of the city and what has disappeared in the desire to pour concrete over our spaces? 

What becomes then, of an archive that is meant to represent both a festival and its communities? 

On the occasion of our Laboratório — Arquivo, escrita e performance como práticas de reflexão e crítica at CAMPUS, the question of visibility and access to the festival and its archive was put on the table by participants. Where is it, and how can it be experienced? This question is both simple and complex, because not only archives and art criticism exist, like it or not, in a paradigm of political and social production to serve capital, but they also often conceal what is not desirable to be seen and experienced. Most minorities in the city have little access to cultural production, even if programming shifts towards more representation of said minorities. This year, one of our Writer in Residence, Claire Sivier is inviting various black women, residents in the city, to experience performances at the festival. Most had never been to the festival or even the buildings it occupies. Pedro Vilela has written extensively about the disparities between what and who is represented on stage, and who gets to experience it. 

Most of the population of Porto has no idea, truthfully, that this festival is happening. Ask the street-dwelling young people or the gossiping ladies in the café down your road. Of course, as expanding as a cultural structure might be, it can’t reach everyone (I am not sure my mum even knows what a Primavera Sound is, regardless of the annual €600,000 the council throws at its multi-millionaire production structure), but as the city centre continues to be more exclusively to those with international capital, so are the very communities and artists the festival seeks to ‘represent’ forced to move to the periphery. In contemporary Porto, performances happen mostly within theatre spaces, which are in itself exclusionary of working classes and of minority communities such as migrants and people of colour. This is, of course, a problem of the whole sector, not exclusively of DDD. Outside, where some performances are presented, they often happen against a backdrop of gentrification and colonial legacies. The same happens with the audiences, of course. It is no longer enough for programmers to place performances ‘in public spaces’ as a way to reach people who don’t come to their festivals. On the occasion of Dinis Quilavei’s performance in the city’s so-called public market, Mercado do Bolhão, his black body performs a dance “that seeks to rediscover the sacred within the ruins of time” to a sea of mostly white, middle-class and bewildered tourists. His body is a moving temple, a site ‘where memories, silences, voices and gods dwell’ (in his own description) performing against a static temple of contemporary colonial extractivism. Nearby, a piece by Luísa Saraiva proposes a series of reflective scores of vocal and movement from working class traditions found in North West Portuguese communities, in a blackbox filled with programmers and artists as its mostly white and middle class audiences. 

These intersections between bodies on stage, bodies on the street, cultural production, rampant capitalism and the archive that we are navigating proves a challenging topic for all of us: historically, who is represented and supported in this city? The institutions will always have their own narratives with which they sell their programmes, their own ways of choosing what to present, what to archive and what to make visible. You can find this festival’s own narrative easily on its website, brochure and instagram pages. They are beautifully designed and invitational, while also allowing for critiques to emerge through public conversations and writing projects on this very blog. That is very present and easily findable. In our relationship with DDD, we have never had any questions asked about the nature of our critical writing, and this is a welcoming and developing relationship, often rare due to other space’s shyness/avoidance of criticisms. 

So we are interested in what is not there and why it is not there. Perhaps naïvely, one could argue that it is impossible to archive everything, all of this context, all of the structural and personal parts of what makes the infrastructure of a festival grappling with an ever moving city. But this also allows us to look at what is in between archival folders and PDFs, to engage in speculative and critical re-production of what is not there. And what we find that is not there, are the conditions with which the artists took part, as well as the narratives of inconvenience. 

By “inconvenience” here, I mean things that did not ‘fit’, be that because it was too much a deviation from a specific years’ programming narrative, or because a file is too big to hold in a drive, or because there’s no documentation of a specific event or performance, or because news and/or critical articles that have since disappeared off the internet (we all know how the internet is a fallible archive!). But I also mean inconvenience in the sense of items or narratives that could challenge the very infrastructure within which sites of cultural production happen to exist, because they represent the margins, the archives that have become invisible or forgotten by the infrastructural crossroads this city finds itself in. These archives and the narratives they hold, however, still reverberate in the bodies and communities of those affected/moved by them today. 

Take, for instance, the story and memory of Mário Calixto (1960-1977) and his work in this city. Here is a case of a migrant black artist who lived in this city and helped shape the way we understand dance today. While his archive is rich and expansive, he spent his short life living on the margins of the infrastructure of the Portuguese, euro-centric ‘dance sector’ of its time. Those reverberations are still felt today. His family has kept an archive that is as extraordinary in its documentation and research as the personal care that is devoted to it. Calixto’s daughter, Wura Moraes, presented a beautifully composed piece that took his archive (and that of his late brother as well) as a starting point to foster her own artistic methodology and identity. During our programmed talk These bodies in this city: situated landscapes in performance and critical writing, Dori Nigro read excerpts of a self-written text that not only touches on Calixto’s work and material conditions but also on how it can reflect on today’s artists’ own experience in the city and the sector. Not much has changed when it comes to the sustainability of marginalised bodies, but what has changed is the individualisation of the artist as a self-producing ‘structure’, with no time or recourse to create at their own pace, across the city’s cultural landscapes. What hasn't changed either, is the Euro-centrism and structural racism with which migrant, racialised bodies have to contend with in the city and in their dealings with sites of cultural production. 

For that talk, we decided on a venue that provides a refreshing ground in the middle of Porto: A PiSCiNA. Centered right in the middle of Porto’s busiest street, this old building with a swimming pool that is now a performance space has become a site of resistance and cultural production that supports and programmes new artists, with very little resources. Set in its adjacent ‘old man’s club’ lounging area, and against the backdrop of building and crowd noises from outside, our guests and participants opened up their own personal archives and inquiries. One provocations, posed by the artist Tiziano Cruz, invited us to rethink what we mean by ‘periphery’ and ‘centre’. Perhaps the city centre has been left vacant for the artists who brought it to life for so long. Perhaps the new peripheries are the new centre. But what is left behind? How is that preserved?

It felt like fertile ground for on-going discussions or at least an attempt to open up archives that have consistently been seen as ‘inconvenient’. Perhaps we will continue to open up this space, outside the context of the festival, so that communities can continue to come together and personal archives can inspire new focal points. 

The text maintains the author's choices, both in terms of spelling variations and stylistic expression.