Deep Waters, Soft Circuits: Caparica’s Periphera Festival Plugs Art into the Tide
From the cloisters of the Convento dos Capuchos to the old prison of Trafaria, Festival Periphera turns Almada’s periphery into a portal — where art hacks technology, and community rewrites the future.
When you cross the river to the south side of Lisbon, everything slows down — the surf, the light, the pulse. But for one long weekend in November, Caparica and Trafaria will buzz with a new kind of electricity. From 14–16 November, the second edition of Festival Periphera transforms this quiet coastal stretch into an experimental interface between art and technology — a space for creative disruption, collective reflection, and a bit of digital witchcraft.
Curated by Plataforma NOVA IAT (the Institute of Art and Technology at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) and backed by the Almada Municipality, the festival reimagines the periphery not as a border, but as a prototype zone — a place where ideas can glitch, mutate, and evolve outside the capital’s polished circuits. Everything is free, from the workshops to the live performances, and even the shuttle that loops every 30 minutes between the two main hubs.
The South Side Upload
Festival Periphera doesn’t take place in the white cubes of Lisbon’s galleries. Its venues are the Convento dos Capuchos, the old Trafaria prison, the Sociedade Musical Trafariense, and other community spaces usually untouched by the tech-art circuit. The lineup mixes workshops, performances, showcases, and immersive installations, all circling around the same question: what happens when creative code leaves the screen and enters the streets?
Opening on Friday, 14 November, the festival launches with an exhibition featuring the results of artist residencies and collaborations, followed by “Toxicidade 101”, a workshop by Inês Tartaruga Água exploring the darker side of tech environments. Later, “Deep Waters” and “Atmospheric Metabolism” transform the Sociedade Musical Trafariense into a liquid, data-driven ecosystem, blending sound art and environmental science.
Meanwhile, at the Capuchos cloister, conversations with Freddie Hong, Ana Teresa Vicente, and Niklas Roy & Katiprobe the philosophical limits of the digital body — asking what it means to feel through algorithms, to dream in pixels, and to resist surveillance through performance.
Beyond the Firewall
Saturday’s “Laboratório Náutico” takes over the old Trafaria prison, turning the site’s carceral architecture into a speculative maritime lab. Visitors can join “Sessões de Audição Subaquática,” an audio exploration that dives below the Tejo’s surface to map the sonic life of marine ecosystems. Half the session unfolds on a boat departing from the Doca de Belém, the other back onshore in Trafaria — a poetic choreography between data and tide.
By night, the Sociedade Musical Trafariense hosts a trio of experimental performances fusing code, sound, and movement — the kind of live experiment where glitch becomes groove and sensors become instruments.
Resistance Protocols
The festival’s final day leans fully into politics. The performance “Manual de Resistência para 2050” speculates on how art might survive — or fight back — in a world of algorithmic control. The accompanying debate, “Resistências à vigilância tecnológica da arte,” gathers artists, technologists, and activists to discuss what autonomy looks like when every click and gesture is tracked.
Things end on a softer note — with Sara Wual Barros performing at sunset in the Capuchos convent, where the sound of her voice bleeds into the Atlantic wind.
In a city obsessed with centrality and prestige, Periphera feels like an intentional rerouting. It’s not about tech as spectacle, but tech as resistance, as poetry, as proximity.
Here, the future doesn’t arrive with a keynote or an NFT drop — it arrives by ferry, humming, collective, and a little bit weird.
