Interactive performance "Practices of Presence"

A multisensory, participatory experience creating a shared space to pause, connect, and practice attention.

About performance

Extending the themes of the exhibition Drifting Signals, Lasting Traces—currently on view at Aea Space, a cultural venue inside TIMS café & padaria—Practices of Presence is an invitation to slow down and explore communication beyond words and screens.

Join us for a 90-minute event featuring two interactive performances unfolding side by side. Exhibition participant Inês Magalhães presents AGORA, encouraging participants to listen, draw, and create a collaborative artwork through an attentive exploration of sound. She is joined by artist Ania Shekhvatova, who brings her itinerant project random t room to Aea Space for the evening. Through coffee or tea and a carefully composed sensory environment, random t room invites visitors to connect and experience Aea Space through attention, conversation, and exchange.

AGORA takes place in three sessions of up to 30 minutes each, while random t room runs continuously, allowing visitors to join and leave at any time. We invite you to spend the evening moving between the two performances, taking time to reflect and discover new ways of being present.

Open to all ages. All materials are provided.

AGORA. The Gallery of Now. Listening Through Drawing by Inês Magalhães

An interactive performance, AGORA (“now” in Portuguese), offers a meditative exercise in focused attention that anchors participants in the present moment. Guided by a curated playlist, participants are invited to respond intuitively to what they hear by engaging with questions such as: How does a rhythm feel? What lines does a melody suggest? What shapes belong to a sound? They then translate their auditory experience into drawing, creating a collaborative artwork.

The sound is experienced through wireless headphones, creating a personal micro-environment within a shared space where participants can pause, reflect, and engage deeply without distraction. By shifting attention away from representation and toward sensory perception, AGORA invites deep listening as an act of presence, personal interpretation, and collective expression.

The performance is open to everyone—no artistic training is required. It will take place in three sessions of up to 10 participants, each lasting a maximum of 30 minutes.

About random t room by Ania Shekhvatova

random t room is an itinerant project initiated in 2018 by Ania Shekhvatova together with Dasha Mamba. Initially developed within club and rave culture and setting, it offered a place to pause, drink tea or coffee, meet others, and briefly shift attention from the surrounding flow to the experience of the present moment.

Over time, it became clear that random t room is not so much a space as a state. Through taste, aroma, sound, texture, and visual arrangements, the project transforms each new venue into a temporary, site-specific space of encounter.

As part of Practices of Presence, the project will engage with the layered context of Aea Space—a hybrid cultural venue situated within TIMS café and padaria, in a museum in Santos, one of Lisbon’s busiest areas. Participants are invited to meet one another and the artist over coffee and take part in a multisensory practice of attention, creating a shared space for conversation, reflection, and exchange.

About Aea Space

Aea Space, a new cultural platform by Aea: Culture Initiative—an independent creative laboratory working across cultures, connecting researchers and practitioners through collaborative making. Situated at TIMS café & padaria inside a museum in Santos, it operates as an open, city-facing environment for exchange, where exhibitions, research, and public conversation are shaped by a range of lived experiences, including those formed by isolation, displacement, and migration, precarity, and broader conditions of social instability.

Performances open to all ages.
All materials are provided.

More info about the event.

When: 30 July, 18:00-19:30

AGORA interactive format: 3 sessions at 18:00, 18:30, 19:00
random t room interactive format: participants can drop in and leave at any time

Where: Aea Space at TIMS café & padaria
Address: Rua Dom Luís I 22, Lisboa
🎟️Tickets:
Standard €12
Kids €6

Follow Aea's website and Instagram for more info.