Shifting Grounds
No Borders on the Waves: Surf Farm Caparica Makes the Ocean a Space of Belonging
Once a pastime of the privileged, surfing is being reimagined as a tool of liberation for migrants and refugees.
Shifting Grounds
Terrains in transit, truths in tension.
Shifting Grounds
Quiet Luxury x Coastal Lockout: The Velvet Rope Beaches of the Alentejo
How Portugal’s public beaches became a playground for billionaires, one villa at a time.
Shifting Grounds
From Pink Street to Beato: Musicbox Dies So Casa Capitão Can Live
After 18 years, Lisbon's legendary underground sanctuary closes forever. Six days later, the revolution rises from its ashes.
Shifting Grounds
Islands, Wetlands, and Memory: Lusophone Africa’s New World Heritage
UNESCO’s latest World Heritage sites in Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau challenge colonial conservation models—and place community-led ecology at the center.
Shifting Grounds
The Curve and the Edge: Architecture as Promise and Protest
What Brazilian architecture reveals about class, ideology, and the battle for public space.
Shifting Grounds
The Bulldozer Arrives Before the Solution: Evictions, Spectacle, and the Politics of Exclusion
As real estate speculation thrives, the Lisbon periphery becomes a battlefield where precarious lives are crushed under the weight of police operations and policy failures.
Shifting Grounds
Traffic as Theatre: Lisbon’s Rush Hour as Performance of Urban Anxiety
From medieval alleys to motorway gridlocks, Lisbon performs modernity while choking on its own choreography.
Shifting Grounds
A Man with a Shovel: The Trees That Hélio Built
One man’s quiet campaign to reforest São Paulo, tree by tree.
Shifting Grounds
Postcards from Nowhere: The False Paradise of Portugal’s Coastal Boom
The Coast Is Clear—Of Locals, Laws, and Limits.
Shifting Grounds
The River Between Us: Almada Between Memory and Masterplan
What exactly is at stake for Almada? And what does this say about the future of urban Portugal?
Shifting Grounds
Reclaiming the Tracks: Transpraia’s Second Life
On a forgotten beach line, Portugal reimagines a future of collective movement.
Shifting Grounds
The Soft Violence of Discovery
From admiration to erasure: reflections on being a foreign creative in a country slowly pricing out its own.