Shared library, meeting point, collective space for reflection, organization, struggle — but also rest. This is the Comunoteca, a Public Program within the Porto Design Biennale: a place to think not only about what design is, but about how we live, work, and resist within and beyond it.

From performative readings on women typographers made invisible in mainstream history to debates on wages, contracts and unions, Comunoteca insists on looking at design as a field of labour — marked by exploitation but also by the invention of alternatives. ​​Work is always unfolded as practice, livelihood, and struggle. The same goes for time: precarious, fragmented, ruled by impossible deadlines, yet also reinvented through other cosmologies and practices. 

Open assemblies, cooperative networks, and kinship libraries underline the insistence on the collective as method. Instead of competition, Comunoteca proposes friendship; against isolation, it builds support structures. Just as central is the role of memory and counter-history. At the centre of it all is care as a political foundation, understood as the basis for another kind of creative economy — one that values rest, affection and solidarity. 

28.10. - 15.11.2025
Biblioteca Popular Pedro Ivo
Praça do Marquês, Porto

Public Programme
Free entry

Accessibility Plan for the Pedro e Ivo Public Library