‘PLACE at the Table’ in the school year 2025/26
Throughout the 2025/26 school year, around 200 pupils from Escola Básica Mestre Querubim Lapa, part of the Marquesa de Alorna School Group in Campolide, will explore the table as a symbolic, relational, and sensory space – a place of ritual and of physical, emotional, and social nourishment.
Through artistic practice and shared experiences, this school year’s edition of the project LUGAR [PLACE] addresses themes such as food, resource scarcity, and sustainability, transforming the act of gathering around the table into an exercise in listening, empathy, and social transformation.
The artists Alice Artur and Joana Trindade Bento from Joy Food Experiences and the artist Francisca Paiva present a proposal in which food is activated as a plastic, ethical, and relational object — questioning the relations and possible interventions around a table, where the act of eating becomes a pretext to think about inclusion, citizenship, sharing, and social transformation. The table emerges as a place of nourishment that is at once individual, intimate, and collective profoundly social and ancestral.
Francisca Paiva, food artist and educator, graduated in Culinary Arts at the Escola de Hotelaria e Turismo de Lisboa and in Food Design at the Escola Superior de Hotelaria e Turismo do Estoril. In her practice she weaves together art, food, and pedagogy, proposing sensory approaches and rituals that frame eating as a gesture of care, awareness, and collective construction.
Alice Artur and Joana Trindade Bento are graduated in Artes Plásticas at the Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas da Rainha and founders of the creative platform Joy Food Experiences. They develop authorial and collaborative projects that bring together visual and performing arts, food, education, and social intervention.
LUGAR [PLACE] is a participatory art and education project that, since 2022, has been building common ground between school and museum, promoting values of equity, interculturality, and social justice in a perspective of active citizenship.
