At the heart of the space, on the floor, a large surface collected traces of shared moments: a collective mixed media art piece, created through gestures of play, movement, and sometimes shy, sometimes joyful, sometimes other, experimentation. Participants were invited to throw paint, walk across or otherwise affect the surface, paste fragments into a collage, and layer textures and elements in real time, allowing something messy, beautiful, and utterly spontaneous to emerge — charged with the energy of our co-presence.
To the side, a grand piano stood transformed. Composer and experimental musician Professor Tato Taborda had adorned it with an assortment of odd and poetic instruments — a sonic ecosystem inviting touch, curiosity, and improvisation. The piano was played not as a solitary performance, but as an invitation to collective resonance, as participants moved between sound and colour, rhythm and image, body and surface.
This happening, guided by Luiz Guilherme Vergara with students of the Arts Programme at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, was a live exercise in connective pedagogy — an open and magical atmosphere where learning, creating, and relating folded into one another. Vergara held the space as a guardian of process, allowing the unexpected to surface while gently shaping it into shared meaning.
Among the participants was Chrystalleni Loizidou, who joined with her child. The experience was one of delight and inspiration — not only in the freedom of the artistic gestures, but in the deep compatibility between the environment and her child’s presence. What might have been considered a distraction in traditional pedagogies became here a source of energy and expansion. As the gathering came to a close, the group left the university space and walked together by the sea, carrying colourful flags made of fabric and bamboo — a gentle reclaiming of public space through presence, colour, and shared movement, along with the wind, the salt air, and the sunset.
The event offered a living lesson in how radical hospitality, artistic openness, and intergenerational presence can become part of the same practice — a pedagogy that listens, includes, and transforms.
