The Lisbon We Long For: Imagining the Spaces That Bring Us Closer
Update: We have an indoor space in the Jardins de Bombarda, in the likely event of rain ☔️
Lisbon is a city layered with histories—of migration, trade, colonial pasts, and cultural crossings. It is a place of longing, arrival, and reinvention.
But as waves of transformation reshape its neighborhoods, who gets to belong? What spaces hold memory, and which ones are still waiting to be imagined?
This creative workshop invites both longtime Lisboetas and more recent arrivals, and anyone who calls this city home—to come together through:
✨ Conversation & sharing on
The state of loneliness, disconnection, and how cities shape our sense of belonging
🎨 Collaborative collage-making as both method and metaphor—exploring what we wish to preserve, transform, or completely reimagine
🌀 A pinch of playfulness to shift from mind to heart and body, inviting intuition into the process
Set in Jardins do Bombarda—a former psychiatric hospital turned cultural and social venue—this space is a living symbol of what it means to reimagine place from the ground up.
What are the places we long for? And what might we create—together?
Come as you are and join us for an afternoon of imagination, connection, and play!
The event is 💛 donation-based with a suggested amount of 15 EUR per person to help cover and support the space, our work, and materials.
We can’t wait to share this time with you—até já!
Gabriella & Monika
Who’s inviting?
Olà, that’ll be us: Gabriella White, an artist, facilitator, and experience design expert offering spaces for improvisation and creative exploration into what it means to be human, and Monika Jiang, writer and community builder with The Oneliness Project, this gathering brings together their shared passion for fostering connection and belonging beyond familiar circles.
Having met and worked together at the House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon, Gabriella and Monika are reuniting to co-create a space for deeper reflection and understanding—through creative expression, play, and movement. After their first collaboration in March 2024 (see a behind the scenes snap above 😁), they return with a new offering, inviting curious minds to engage in a thoughtful, hands-on exploration of place, belonging, and the Lisbon we long for.