An excerpt of the editorial written by me and João Pestana for the workshop and some other relevant aspects:
«In the middle of our relationship with the world, in the middle of our relationship with all the things that surround us, and especially in the middle of our relationship with our own fabrications and ideas, is the gaze. From the moment we are born, our gaze becomes a kind of interlocutor that is always present in the relationships we establish with the place we assume in the surrounding world. 'Seeing comes before words', like John Berger (1972) says in Ways of Seeing.

The way we see the world is, somehow, an image. An image is a representation—internal or external, mental or artefactual—of a gaze that can be both reproduced and recreated. When we talk about internal or mental representations, we are talking about dreams, imaginations and personal perceptions. In this sense, our brain is the core producer of internal representations which, in turn, reacts to all external representations in the physical world. Therefore, we are image-makers. We, designers, are image-makers.

When we talk about images in the current state of contemporaneity, some of us may agree that the images we create today differ from those created ten, fifteen, twenty or more years ago—back then, the rubrics under which images were inscribed were different. Today, everything is considered an image. But what interests us here is the idea of returning to a space where we produce our own images, based on our perception, our gaze and what was the essence of image production before the advent of the first photographic and film cameras. In other words, what interests us is the creation of images based on the analogue record of how we see something or someone, like a painting, a drawing, a sculpture.»

Da Realidade à Heterotopia Visual: Exercícios sobre o que vemos, como vemos e as imagens que daí surgem (From Reality to Visual Heterotopia: Exercises on what we see, how we see and the images that stem from it) stemmed from the initial motivations listed above.

First, we challenged the participants to create images of certain objects. These images had the same purpose and objective for each participant, but the images produced by each one were obviously different, because each person's way of looking at the objects was different, along with the intentions and criteria that each participant ended up defining to create the image. And basically, this is where the concept of visual heterotopia comes in.

According to Michel Foucault (1984), in Of Other Spaces, the heterotopia is a real but complex space, with several layers and marked by inverted relationships. Unlike a utopia, which would be an imaginary and non-existent space, the heterotopia that Foucault proposes is a kind of realised utopia: a space that represents and challenges reality, but doesn't abandon it.

During the workshop, several images of a single object were generated, but they differ from one another because our individual way of looking at our surroundings is also different. Each image created of the same object is, in fact, a singular manifestation within a multiplicity of coexisting perceptions. Visual heterotopia is not just the alteration of an isolated perception, but the overlapping of different perceived realities that exist simultaneously.