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Slow Memory and Beyond in Porto 2025
Cost Action: Slow Memory” International Conference took place in Porto from July 2 to 4, 2025
From July 2 to 4, the city of Porto hosted the international conference COST Action: Slow Memory, a unique event that invited reflection on how collective memories, historical traumas and forgotten legacies are inscribed in the territory and in the human experience – slowly, silently and often invisibly.
Organized as part of the European network COST Action Slow Memory, this conference brought together more than 300 participants from over 40 countries, including researchers, artists, architects, activists and representatives of local communities. The aim was to explore the concept of Slow Memory.
What is Slow Memory?
We live in a world full of contradictions – where digital networks speed everything up, but inequalities, crises and uncertainties continue to grow. In order to face challenges such as climate change, automation, pandemics and political instability, we need to slow down and reflect on the past. The Slow Memory proposal invites us to think about how cultural practices and memory can help build more thoughtful and sustainable responses in this dizzying and sometimes overwhelming time.
The conference program, which includes lectures, round tables, guided tours, artistic presentations and interventions in various spaces in the city, seeks to promote the exploration of this concept over three days, focusing on themes such as the memory of colonialism, the violence of dictatorships, forced migrations, environmental trauma and forgotten forms of resistance.
The conference is open to the public, subject to prior registration, and is intended as a space for critical reflection and the sharing of experiences, crossing disciplines, geographies and temporalities. The city of Porto, with its multifaceted history, marked by layers of visible and hidden memory, offers the ideal setting for this reflection.
