Procurarte

Rua Neves Ferreira, 8B, Lisboa, Portugal 1170-274

Inauguration → 17 . 10 . 2025 → 10:00 pm

18 . 10 . 2025 → 17 . 11 . 2025

tuesday - friday → 03:00 pm – 07:00 pm

Artist

Augusto Brázio

Situated along the former Military Road — a 19th-century defensive axis that later became a symbolic boundary between the center and the periphery of Lisbon — Reboleira emerges as a territory that reflects the urban contradictions of 20th-century Portugal. Originating in the 1960s and 70s, this area bears witness to the rise of an urgent urbanism, born outside of official plans, outside the law, and off the official maps.

More than just a cluster of illegal housing, this was the set of an architecture of survival. The shacks, the self-built structures, the improvised materials — all point to acts of resistance in a country undergoing transition: between the collapse of its colonial empire and the unfulfilled promise of modernity. Two major migratory movements passed through here: first, those arriving from the rural interior in search of work in the capital; later, the returnees from the former African colonies, fleeing war and the collapse of the imperial project. Both found an urban void in which to assert their presence — a void left by the State, which never truly reached the periphery.

Reboleira is not a forgotten place; it is a persistent space. Today, a few houses still stand, scattered amid an everchanging urban fabric. They are material remnants of a time the city tried to erase, but that continues to confront us. These fragile structures, often rendered invisible, are inadvertent monuments to a defiant memory — not only of poverty, but of the urgency of those who, in the face of abandonment, built a life.

In this fragmented territory, the city reveals its crudest face: one where inequality is inscribed in space itself. And it is precisely within this fracture — between what was denied and what was asserted out of sheer necessity — that Reboleira stands as a living, though wounded, document of contemporary urban history.