We live in a time when everything becomes noise. The city is criss-crossed by images that dispute the gaze, messages that saturate the space, gestures that, in their eagerness to be seen, become invisible. In this context, public art...
moreWe live in a time when everything becomes noise. The city is criss-crossed by images that dispute the gaze, messages that saturate the space, gestures that, in their eagerness to be seen, become invisible. In this context, public art faces the challenge of not being just another layer of stimulation, but of establishing other ways of listening, paying attention and relating. This issue of R3iAP News proposes thinking of public art as an ecology of attention -a sensitive field that resists the logic of instant visibility and the symbolic monetisation of space. Attention here is not just a perceptual act, but an ethical and political disposition. It means opening up time and space for the other, for the place, for the event. Similar to what Yves Citton proposes when he talks about attention as a common resource to be protected, we can also conceive of public art as an ecological practice: not in the most immediate environmental sense, but as an exercise in caring for the sensitive, for ways of seeing, listening and being together. Art thus becomes not an intervention on space, but listening to space. Throughout this issue, you'll find examples and reflections along these lines. Works that refuse the monumental and the spectacular, preferring a long dialogue, a discreet inscription and a lasting relationship. Practices that call on the community not as an audience, but as co-authors. Proposals that turn public art into a laboratory of attention for the community. In this context, the city is neither a stage nor a showcase. It is living matter, made up of layers of time, of memories in dispute, of latent conflicts, of sedimented affections. The public art we are interested in is not that which is superimposed on this matter, but that which is inscribed in it -as a counterpoint, as an excavation, as a poetic or political interruption. The contributions we have gathered -from sound interventions to community projects, from debates on the decolonisation of monuments to the valorisation of intangible heritage -form a possible route through this complex landscape. But more than mapping out answers, this issue aims to raise questions: -How do we listen to public space? -What voices does it amplify, what presences does it make invisible? -What future can we design with and from attention? In a time dominated by acceleration and fragmentation, recovering attention as an aesthetic and political practice can be a gesture of resistance. And public art, more than any other form, also carries the power to transform common space into shared space. We invite all members of the Network to contribute proposals, reports, essays or documents that fall within this horizon. May this be an edition made up of multiple listenings, crossed by the plurality of practices that think about and make public art an exercise in radical attention. João Sequeira iA* investigação em Artes -UBI Section dedicated to display local, national and international initiatives related to public art and the like. Implanted at the end of 2024, it is important to announce the placement of a simple but beautiful monument next to the former Academy of Fine Arts of Porto, now the Municipal Library, in honour of the watercolourist and sculptor António Cruz. A singular figure, António Cruz, whose biography is summarised on the page dedicated to him on the R3iAP NEWS # 4 July 2025 University of Porto's website, the tribute paid to him by his family and the Porto City Council is a tribute to the artist's watercolour research into the peculiar luminosity of his city, which was immortalised by Manoel de Oliveira in the 1956 documentary 'O Pintor e a Cidade' (The Painter and the City), which inaugurated the introduction of colour in Portuguese cinematography. A visual and musical meditation on light as only watercolour can present, António Cruz's work thus problematically documents the artist's encounter/disencounter with his city, through a discreet but solemn memorial in dark marble streaked with white, projected by arch. José Carlos Cruz, where the artist's expressively modelled self-portrait rests, reminding us that as well as painting, António Cruz also mastered sculpture.