About a month before we went to Guimaraes to carry out the Museu da Crise workshops, we made a questionnaire available through our website. This questionnaire had multiple-choice questions about the domestic strategies and methodologies that people had developed as a way to economise, save money and deal with the effects of the monetary crisis in their daily lives.
The questions were based on a series of interviews with Portuguese people from all layers of society. More importantly the questionnaire asked the participants for the real alternatives they has developed or imagined to the social, political and economic status quo. We used the input of about 500 online participants in a series of 6 workshops…
Each workshop began with a brief introduction to the ideas and concepts behind the Museu da Crise. During the workshops we asked people take these private, domestic strategies and apply them to a society as a whole in drawing and text. All workshops were documented and this forms the basis for the film that we made and presented at ESAP on December the 6th, the drawings and writings produced during the six workshops and taken from the online questionnaire were used to design a poster/ booklet that was presented the same day.
The poster / booklet can be found (and downloaded, please spread among your friends!) elsewhere on our website (in Portuguese, English version on its way) and the film will be translated into English and made available online at a later stage. The film does not only document the workshop process, but also delves into the ideas behind the Museu da Crise, is a reflection on the crisis and the state that Portugal is in. Additional material was shot in Porto during a big manifestation against the Troijka and also in Lisbon at the Portuguese Pavilion, the building that we take as a metaphor for the Portuguese status quo. And last but not least: We got to interview the renowned architect of the Portuguese Pavilio, Alvaro Size Vieira! More to come…