DIOGO PASSARINHO STUDIO

Diogo Passarinho Studio developed the scenography and spatial consultancy for Melted for Love, establishing a cohesive spatial framework across three venues, W139, Arti et Amicitiae, and Rozenstraat – a rose is a rose is a rose.

Responding to the Biennial’s exploration of hospitality, kinship, and collective listening, the project approaches space as a sensitive and adaptive medium, one that holds, listens, and responds. Each venue is conceived as part of an interconnected ecology, supporting distinct curatorial trajectories while maintaining a shared spatial language grounded in attentiveness, care, and openness.

At W139, the scenographic approach supports works engaging ecological catastrophe, extractive histories, and contested infrastructures. At Arti et Amicitiae, the spatial framework embraces love as a regenerative, more-than-human force, accommodating practices rooted in ancestral memory, land, and environmental entanglement. At Rozenstraat, the design creates conditions for reflecting on ongoing grief and temporal continuity, resisting closure while holding space for collective mourning.

Across all sites, materials, thresholds, and spatial rhythms are carefully composed to foster proximity, permeability, and participation. Rather than prescribing fixed narratives or pathways, the design invites open-ended encounters, allowing sound, bodies, and stories to co-compose the environment. Visitors are positioned not as passive spectators, but as participants within a shared field of relations.

The project engages scenography as a practice of care, cultivating conditions for vulnerability, exchange, and solidarity. It contributes to the Biennial’s broader inquiry into how listening can shape new forms of togetherness, and how spatial design can support temporary yet meaningful experiences of belonging.

2026 Sonic Acts, NL
Curator: Angeliki Tzortzakaki
Exhibition Design: Diogo Passarinho Studio
Team: Diogo Passarinho and Gonçalo Reynolds
Artists at Arti et Amicitiae: Nour Shantout, Noor Abed, Dominique White, Ameneh Solati, HUNITI GOLDOX, Arjuna Neuman
Production: Radina Alexandrova
Photography: Pieter Kers

D_P_S >> EXHIBITION DESIGN FOR TIME IS PRESENT:DESIGNING THE COMMON, AT PORTO DESIGN BIENNALE

What was once a parking space is transformed into an immersive landscape, inviting visitors to explore the shifting dimensions of time and knowledge. At the heart of the intervention lies a newly carved central avenue, created through selective demolitions. This spine draws visitors deeper into the exhibition, setting itself in deliberate contrast to a system of oblique, diagonal walls that fracture linearity and open up unexpected paths of discovery.

Inspired by the concept of cosmic latte, the average colour of the universe as seen from Earth, the exhibition bathes its visitors in a palette that embodies the immensity of time itself. Light drifts through gradients of orange and yellow, evoking the eternal rhythm of sunrise and sunset, of mourning and renewal, and imbuing the journey with a profound sense of temporal resonance.

The exhibition invites us to consider design practices as a constituent part of the creation of shared social ecosystems, where the Common is not a foundation but a production, an invention of a state of becoming, in which designers collectively reclaim the relational, collaborative, and qualitative dimensions of shared experience as an essential alternative to the exploitative logic of contemporary capitalism.

What happens when design shifts from solving future problems to gardening present possibilities through collective agency? Bringing together over 60 projects, this manifesto exhibition showcases a variety of design initiatives and innovative formats, organised according to the most participatory common factor: our emotions.


2025, Porto, PT
Curators: Angela Rui and Matilde Losi
Exhibition Design by D_P_S
Team: Diogo Passarinho and Gonçalo Reynolds
Graphic Design: João Queirós
Photography: Inê d’Orey