Loking at spaces designed for adults, the quest for leisure, forgetfulness and imagination often leads to environments that are predominantly commercialized, reinforcing dichotomies between public and private spheres, nature and culture, and limiting acces to the generation of knowledge. Reflecting on this, I found libraries to be public spaces with the most potential to foster culture and host people, especially those who may not easily find hospitality elsewhere. This experience aims to reimagine the purpose and design of libraries as spaces that provide communal rest and fosters connections and is a reminding of the influence our environment has on generating alternative narratives for ourselves and society.

— Interlude, between wakefulness and being asleep, you close your eyes, try to shake off the weight of your body. You allow yourself to untie from the place you’re laying at, yet uncertain about where the journey will lead. A moment of vulnerability, relying on the assurance of safety without seeing what’s around you. This is the juncture where bedtime stories find their place – narratives that either reveal trust in our current reality or help us ascend it to feel at ease. In this spectrum we find a moment we all share, perhaps is in this the reality that we all inhabit, an individual shelter that we have in common.

 

Contemplating the role of the surrounding walls in our dreams, one wonders about the influence of the environment on our imaginative capacities, in our ability to transcend our day to day reality. Could we traverse greater distances if we listened to more stories, if we shared other realities? When surrounded by walls during sleep, everything echoes within, it lingers, interacting with the various matters in the room, including ourselves. Contrastingly, if one were to slumber outside, where everything permeates, oneself becomes the walls in the interaction between the infinite objects around, with such an abundance of sounds how can one not be unsure which to follow? — 

Bedtime

Stories

Research

Inspired by the ambiance of bedtime stories, a visual metaphor was created to reclaim the pivotal role libraries play in enhancing social cohesion and inclusion. Beyond archiving books, libraries should be vibrant spaces democratizing culture, making it accessible to all. The intervention, at Jardim de Marques de Oliveira near the Municipal Library of Porto, consisted in covering a park bench with pages from a book, starting at its final chapter and progressively unveiling its narrative in reverse.

 

The chosen location, a bench in the park, provided a backdrop where some individuals seek solace and rest, and others just a shelter to stay the night. Deliberately separating pages signifies an ongoing, incomplete story, emphasising the transformative power of cultural access, providing us with a hopeful vision of our future possibilities. While the process held a tinge of sadness in dismantling a book, it was intended to question societal priorities—how we meticulously preserve cultural artifacts while sometimes overlooking the living, breathing narratives of individuals facing the elements. The intervention welcomes us to hear the intertwined stories shaping our shared reality, equalizing the importance of told stories with the muted ones occurring in the background of our daily lives, it claims to create a space where both narratives can take place.

 the soft ambiance — light, sound, time, the association of ideas

How does the bedtime story the city is telling sound like? What is there while eyes are closed? In order to incorporate an auditory landscape to this narrative, here are some sound recordings as a way of showing contrast between places. Some of them taken in the library, a walk back home at night, capturing a quiet evening in bed, some moments near a place where a homeless person sleeps.

The contrast within the audio goes beyond the sounds. Each recording became a temporal capsule, reflecting the comfort of each of the enviroments, the duration of presence in different spaces. Establishing a temporal dichotomy between the conservation of culture and the immediacy of the precarious, mirroring the diverse experiences within the city.

During the process of covering the bench I came across some special pages from the book that  I decided not to use at that time. Latter one was left on each place in wich audio was recorded.