In the month that marks International Women's Day, Agenda Porto went to meet the MAAD Collective (Women Art Architecture & Design), responsible for the Feminist Tour of Porto. Isabeli Santiago, Alícia Medeiros and Chloé Darmon guide us through public places in Porto to remember the lives and works of women artists, writers and activists. Ana Plácido, Carolina Michaëlis, Virgínia Moura, Henriqueta da Conceição and Gisberta Salce are just some of the names on the route. As they walk, they leave ephemeral memories.

Isabeli, assistant curator at Galeria Municipal do Porto since 2019, and Alícia, architect, artist and independent researcher, met in 2016 and wanted to bring their work and practices together: During her Master's degree in Art and Design for Public Space at FBAUP, Alícia developed research on walking as an artistic practice, while Isabeli, as part of her degree in Art History (FLUP), had already designed routes in the city based on the memory of women such as Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Carolina Michaëlis, Rosalia de Castro, local historical archives and literature. Their involvement in feminist collectives led to the first guided tour in 2019, during the now-defunct Porto Feminist Festival.

At the time, they invited curator and researcher Laurem Crossetti, ‘who was interested in practices in public spaces and also wanted to create alternative tours’, and from there, as the MAAD Collective, they drew up an itinerary.

‘It was from the combination of Alícia's research and knowledge as an architect and research artist [she has a PhD in Fine Arts from FBAUP, with a thesis entitled Walking for it: Walking as an artistic practice in mobile media cities: a poetic resistance to gender violence] that we adapted the tour format and the experience in public space,’ emphasises Isabeli, adding that her contribution was related to the historical survey, based on local toponymy, articulated with previous research she had already carried out during her bachelor's and master's degrees.

Together, they ‘shaped the narrative framework, combining architectural theory, art theory and history, artistic methodologies, experimental and feminist pedagogies, frameworks and practices of feminist historiography’.

In the meantime, the collective grew and began to count on the collaboration of Chloé Darmon, a French architect and author of a mapping project entitled ‘Inhabiting Water’, in which she explores the historical relationships between women, water, domestic labour and rurality in the city of Porto and its public washhouses.

‘The tour is an end and a means, which brings together strategies that allow for the recovery, creation and sharing of women's stories in and of the city of Porto,’ says Isabeli, an art historian and PhD candidate in Feminist Studies at the Faculty of Letters of the University of Coimbra. ‘These itineraries are based on an attempt to understand Porto through the history of women, who are apparently invisible in the city's visual culture, and, at the same time, on the desire to work on orality in order to ephemerally inscribe these stories in the city, which then continue their life in an immaterial archive shared between the people who walk with us,’ she explains.

Porto Feminist Tours usually take place between spring and early autumn, when the weather is more conducive to walks, and the MAAD Collective offers four different routes, which can last up to four hours: the historical route, the femi-literary route, the decolonial route and the washhouse route, the latter by Chloé Darmon, who has been a member of MAAD since 2024. The historical route is ‘the most popular’ and the one that happens most often.

The material representations of women in the public space, namely toponymy, public art, graffiti and artistic interventions, as well as the local stories they collect through oral transmission, are criteria for the inclusion of a particular location on the Feminist Tour, considering the different routes. ‘The testimonies of the people who walk with us and which are relevant, the need for artistic intervention, as well as silences, exclusions and invisibilities’ are also taken into account.

Intervention in the public space: an activist performance

Feminist Tours don't just inform and contemplate. They also have an interventionist and activist side, through the ephemeral marks they usually leave in the public space, such as stickers and posters. ‘We try to intervene in the public space to leave a visual presence in the landscape,’ thus alerting people to “landmarks and invisibilities in the public space,” as Isabeli explains. ‘The action of the tour itself ends up standing out in the landscape, like an activist performance in the city.’

Sometimes, the Collective also distributes stickers so that people taking part in the tours can intervene in other places in the city where episodes of ‘sexist, racist or lgbtqiphobic violence’ have occurred.

Women in toponymy: between invisibility and idealisation

Chloé Darmon recalls the book Toponímia Feminina Portuense, by César Santos Silva, which shows that only 1.5 per cent of the city's streets are named after real women. For Chloé, these figures are symptomatic of the ‘invisibility of women’ in the public space.