Porto has a history of colonialism and is recently showing signs of late capitalism, with 80% of people presenting symptoms of burnout. Increased cost of living has led to the erasure of free time and unrest due to overwork.

This project asks how architecture can disrupt (common place) aggressive capitalist and colonial contexts within the city (as a commons), explored through a ‘typology of rest’ with the design of a physical space (the Bare Minimum Institute) for the bare minimum collective: an anti-work arts collective, who do anti-work work in the form of workshops, screenings, performances, and talks.

The Bare Minimum Collective (based in London and imagined in Porto) question and resist against the neo-liberal notion that sustenance, shelter, relaxation, and rest must be earned (through wage-labour), and instead look to a new kind of work: space for pleasure and the abolition of everything but care, mutual aid and community.

The is led by post-work, feminist and disability theory, specifically the manifesto Rest is Resistance, which states that rest disrupts the “grind culture” created by capitalism and white supremacy and instructs us to Rest! Dream! Resist! and Imagine!