“The participants in the ‘Altercação’ project are young people between the ages of 16 and 20. They come from Porto and Gaia and are either studying or both studying and working,” explains Eduarda Machado, the project’s social director. “It’s a stage of life when young people are creating themselves – building their life project, their identity – and so they are highly receptive, open to experimentation… That’s the greatest value.”

Developed under the PARTIS & Art for Change initiative, promoted by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the ”la Caixa” Foundation, “the project’s main goal is to foster emotional literacy,” says Rita Soeiro, the artistic director. Over the course of three years, one of the key artistic outputs was a miniseries. “The young participants had the chance to write the script – their own story – and to bring that script into performance, into emotion, into a character.”

In addition to the miniseries, they also produced a short film. Participant Carlos Costa admits, “It never crossed my mind to do something like this. Now I’m doing it – and actually enjoying it.” For Vítor Santos, the journey was demanding but rewarding: “I had a lot of lines, and sometimes we got them wrong and had to redo them. But like they say, mistakes come so we can fix them.” The impact was also practical: “I learned a lot about video editing, about filming. Even for entering the job market, it could be useful – if I ever want to start a production company or something like that, I’ll already have some experience.”

This “space for experimentation” is, above all, a space for self-discovery, according to Rita Soeiro. “It’s when we play at being many different things that we discover ourselves – what we like, what we don’t like, where we want to go, and where we don’t want to return.”

The project also highlighted the importance of relationships built throughout the process. As Eduarda Machado concludes, “The greatest lesson from this project was that attention is truly captured when we build a relationship with young people.” Participant Alexandre Soares puts it simply: “I learned to give more value to work – and to friendship.”