Super (Models) Everywhere | Escola Superior Artística do Porto (Constellations)

The Porto Design Biennale 2025, Time is Present. Designing the Common, and the Mayrit Biennial 2026, (SUPER)MODELS, when placed in conversation, reveal a shared concern with the architectures of invisibility, those background systems of temporality and modeling that structure collective life. Porto addresses the reification and financialization of time, Madrid the abstraction and proliferation of models. Both expose how these processes suppress alternative rhythms and forms of agency, and both call for practices of design that resist capture. The joint discussion will explore the possibility of what we call generative models, frameworks that do not simply classify or constrain but enable new relations, practices, and futures. Generative models are open, responsive, and situated, aligning with Porto’s notion of the commons by foregrounding collaboration and care. At the same time they respond to Madrid’s recognition of how models can silently produce bodies and worlds, redirecting that productive force toward more inclusive and plural ends. By staging a dialogue between “the presented” and “the modeled”, the commons and the Supermodel, this talk will consider how design can operate epistemically and politically. The aim is not only to critique existing structures of time and modeling but to propose ways of inhabiting and reshaping them. In doing so, both biennales suggest that design today must move beyond objects and buildings and instead toward infrastructures, processes, and possibilities, always attentive to the risks of conformity but alive to the potentials of generative frameworks for collective life.

Talk with Angela Rui, Mohammad Salemy moderated by Miguel Leiro
24th October 2025 | 5 p.m.
ESAP Auditorium | Escola Superior Artística do Porto
R. dos Navegantes no 51, 4000-357 Porto, Porto