Lisbon’s metro stations are often filled with shops and services catering to the everyday needs of commuters: mobile phone stores, hair salons, bakeries, and clothing boutiques. However, inside Picoas metro station, nestled within the financial district, one encounters something unexpected – a space marked by handwritten letters on a glass window reading: “PLAY(THE UNDER)GROUND: MAIS UNO +1 PROJECT-SPACE”. Inside, a range of artistic and experimental activities unfold: an urban art collective hosting silkscreen printing sessions, Korean patchwork workshops, experimental poetry exhibitions, video screenings, and participatory performances using games and objects. An enigmatic travel agency, Berry the Sun, offers whimsical guided tours through the metro, revealing hidden narratives while serving holiday-themed drinks.

This space presents a fascinating ambiguity. Are passersby entering in search of commercial products, or are they drawn – perhaps unknowingly – into an artistic experiment? The identity of the project’s organisers also remains elusive. Are they business professionals, artists, or curators? It is precisely this blurring of roles and the redefinition of space that intrigued the collective mais uno +1¹, prompting them to reflect on the impact of situating an art project within a capitalist-oriented, highly regulated environment.

The metro, as an infrastructure, is intertwined with the story of capitalism, historically designed to optimise productivity by enabling efficient commuting. Tracing its origins back to London in 1863, the metro is emblematic of a capitalist logic that prioritises economic efficiency, reinforcing the roles of consumers and producers. In fact, the history of the metro follows the story of industrialisation, fed by the steam engine and railways.² This economical and social transformation is also supported by economic theories, such as those of Adam Smith, who established a framework in which economic agents make decisions based on individual self-interest towards the optimisation of utility (“invisible hand” theory), adopting the roles of consumers and producers, while later thinkers, including Karl Marx and feminist economists, critiqued this structure for excluding forms of labour that do not directly generate surplus value.³ Within this framework, art has often been marginalised – viewed as “useless” in capitalist terms, detached from everyday life and relegated to elite, speculative markets.⁴ Other authors even argue that the capitalistic system can have an influence on behaviours, influencing the processes of thinking and feeling towards individualistic cost-benefit analysis and consumerism.⁵ 

This raises an essential question: Can an art project situated in the metro challenge the dominant economic logic and foster alternative economies? Concepts such as “diverse economies” and “community economies” propose a broader understanding of economic activity, one that includes collaboration, reciprocity, and shared resources.⁶ The collective mais uno +1 engages in this discourse by reclaiming space in the metro, reconfiguring roles, and fostering collective agency. Mais uno +1 is an informal curatorial collective that emerged in Lisbon following the Covid-19 pandemic, and the experiences of the founding members with collective curating practices at the Vent Space project in Tallinn.

Initially occupying an empty shop in Intendente Square, the group faced challenges in securing a permanent space due to high rents and gentrification. In 2023, it successfully negotiated with METROCOM – the entity managing commercial spaces within Lisbon’s Metro – to use a storefront in Picoas station for artistic programming, free of charge. The negotiations required careful discussion regarding the purpose of the space, as METROCOM initially envisioned commercial use. By emphasising the cultural and social benefits of their project, mais uno +1 negotiated with METROCOM to support their initiative as a non-commercial artistic endeavour. This process exemplifies a form of tactical urbanism, in which artists navigate bureaucratic structures to carve out alternative spaces within capitalist infrastructures.⁷ The collective sees it as a process of commoning⁸, in which resources are collectively managed outside of traditional market logic.

Commoning, as theorised by scholars, refers to the creation and maintenance of shared resources and collective practices that resist commodification. Mais uno +1 operates as a network of artists, researchers, and curators committed to experimenting with collaborative and socially engaged art practices. Their project redefines artistic labour, emphasising process over product, participation over passive consumption, and cooperation over competition.⁹ By embedding themselves within a commercial, transit-oriented space, they challenge conventional distinctions between art and non-art spaces, public and private spheres, and economic subjectivities.

Historically, capitalism has reinforced a strict separation between artistic and non-artistic spaces, commodifying art and confining it to elite institutions.¹⁰ However, alternative artistic movements have long sought to break down these barriers, engaging with non-institutional spaces and incorporating everyday life into artistic practice.¹¹ Mais uno +1 aligns with this trajectory, integrating artistic production within the daily rhythms of the metro to subvert consumerist logic and expand the possibilities of urban space.

By creating an artistic intervention in the metro – the project PLAY(THE UNDER)GROUND – the collective also reimagines it as a site of collective agency. Through inviting commuters to engage with art in unexpected ways, this site-specific project challenges fixed economic roles and proposes alternative modes of exchange, cooperation, and shared experience, offering a model for other collectives seeking to reclaim capitalist spaces for communal and creative purposes, and inspiring new approaches to art, economy, and social transformation.

The establishment of PLAY(THE UNDER)GROUND in Lisbon’s metro was not just an artistic experiment – it was an exercise in navigating and bending the rigid structures of commercial space. Mais uno +1 entered the metro’s commercial ecosystem, not by opposing its rules, but by finding ways to play within them. Their success in securing a storefront without rent was not an act of defiance but rather a careful negotiation, demonstrating how understanding bureaucratic procedures and speaking the language of institutions can open unexpected opportunities for artistic intervention.

METROCOM, the agency responsible for commercial spaces within the metro, agreed to host an art initiative, seeing it as a means to enhance the commuter experience. However, their understanding of what an art space entailed was limited, leaving mais uno +1 with the task of defining and expanding that concept within the metro’s existing framework. By engaging in official processes – proposals, agreements, and safety protocols – the collective created a legitimate presence while subtly subverting expectations.

With their project space established, PLAY(THE UNDER)GROUND became a testing ground for alternative economies, fostering exchanges that challenged traditional consumer-producer relationships. Artists and collectives – often excluded from the formal art market – were invited to occupy the space, contribute a nominal fee for shared costs, and engage with the metro’s diverse public. In doing so, mais uno +1 redefined the metro’s economic and cultural functions, turning a site of transit into a site of participation. In this way, the collective hoped commuters could realise that they too can contribute to “consumption, production and decision-making about culture”.¹² These alternative forms of using and engaging through space, therefore, expand on the economic and cultural performativity of publics and artists, in particular the ones excluded by capitalist hegemony.

This practice of working within the cracks of commercial infrastructure was taken even further with Berry the Sun, an artistic travel agency that pushed the boundaries of how art can exist within regulated spaces. Through humour and play Berry the Sun appropriated familiar commercial aesthetics while redirecting them toward unexpected, poetic experiences. Its ambiguous identity – Was it a shop? An exhibition? A travel service? – not only challenged METROCOM’s expectations but also made commuters engage differently with the space.

By embedding themselves within the metro’s commercial landscape while resisting its transactional logic, mais uno +1 revealed the creative potential hidden in urban infrastructures. The collective referred to this as the wallflower strategy. Wild plants can sometimes grow (and even thrive) in the cracks in buildings. These tiny gaps allow the growth of an alternative reality. The plant, or project, uses the structure of the building, but follows another logic, becoming a light, organic structure living with (and not in spite of) a fixed, immutable, heavy structure. We showed, therefore, rather than rejecting the structures of capitalism outright, artists could infiltrate them, repurpose, and turn them into spaces for collective imagination. The following case study of Berry the Sun offers a closer look at how this strategy unfolded in practice.

While we invited people from outside to take over the space, we also had initiatives from within the collective to approach the questions of the territory, community and use of the metro in artistic projects. One of these projects was the artistic travel agency: Berry the Sun, proposed by Aurélie d’Incau, where the group used humour to play with the concept of travel and the structures and rules of commercial spaces.

From the moment we launched, ambiguity defined our interactions. METROCOM initially misunderstood the project, questioning whether we were running a real travel agency. We clarified that Berry the Sun was an artistic intervention, a play on the structures of commerce rather than an actual business. What we didn’t explain was that this technique of appropriation was fundamental to our approach – by mimicking familiar forms, we created space for unexpected behaviors and perspectives within the metro.

Believing in the potential of non-artistic spaces for the commons, we didn’t want to break the rules that are proper within the metro nor did we want to ignore them. On the contrary, we wanted to explore the space and how we could use the rules as a framework or even as material for the very creation of a fertile dialogue between the artists, communities and territories.

We all perceived the metro as a rather sterile and uncreative space. It took us some time to find the poetics within the metro. The following two thoughts formed the starting point for our inspiration.

In the Situationist Internationale #3, Guy Debord (1959) noted that “commuting time, as Le Corbusier rightly noted, is a surplus labour which correspondingly reduces the amount of ‘free’ time”.¹³ In our words, when entering the metro, the commuters are virtually extracted from life, hidden from the city, even partially cut off from the wifi network, until they resurface in a different time and space. Thus, the time in the metro does not count as part of life outside of labour, neither does it count as labour. Essentially, if not used in a creative or playful way, travelling becomes mundane lost time.

In contrast to the underground, we see the sun, the beach or places on earth that are extremely visually rich as the most desirable destinations, so much that we are willing to lose hours in an aeroplane without real air and without real light, suspended in the sky, just to arrive at that one very specific beach, or that very important mountain, or this extremely old temple. In both situations, the traveller ignores that they are selling their free time, that they spend a lot of time missing the opportunity to fill every moment with playful, aesthetic, meaningful community experiences.

This is why we decided to create a Travel Agency with the name ‘Berry the Sun’ (as in burying the sun underground), to allude to the potential of travelling – which includes the relocation of our physical body – for our mental, spiritual and aesthetic life.

Friedrich Schiller once said that “man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays”.¹⁴ At Berry the Sun, we wanted to propose travel experiences that bring play and magic to the mundane and that metaphorically bring sunlight into the darkness, so that we can activate a playful dialogue not only between the participants but also to captivate the people around us.

The methods and techniques we used at the Berry the Sun agency were strongly inspired by Situationist Internationale and Fluxus methods. Détournement, which means to change, reuse, transform a pre-existing element to give it new meaning, even until it loses its old meaning,¹⁵ was used in many ways. For example, we used the semiotics of the shopfront, which communicates a commercial space and then used humour, play and role-playing to transform it into a magical and abnormal travel agency, promoting imaginary destinations, making the ‘clients’ donate their favourite memories and holiday photographs, or selling all the collateral effects of travelling such as sunburn, sand in your pants or a salty crust on your skin¹⁶, or through guided tours we used the rule that one cannot become sedentary in the metro, becoming aware of our movement in relation to others, almost like choreographic awareness.

The metro is an extremely clean and rule-bound context. We are not allowed to present divergent behaviour (which might be different in other cities). So instead of trying to apply any extra layers of ‘art’ onto the existing physical place, we chose to use imagination and storytelling to look at the world underground in an abnormal, divergent way. Instead of wanting to add artworks to a sterile place, we looked towards creating an aesthetic experience. 

Two guided tours were developed for the agency, again, referring to Situationist approaches such as the “dérive” (the playful act of drifting through the city, the habitual goals of commuting)¹⁷. The Sunsetive Tour looked at the underground network as a big archeological site and used mundane elements of the metro to tell a metaphorical and fictional story of humanity. In addition, the Tracing a Way Tour was a participatory drawing tour, which focused on documenting the sensorial and physical experience using experimental drawing methods.

Upon evaluating the physical shop, we found that its ambiguous semiotics may have hindered engagement. The mixed messages likely led passersby to perceive it as a retail shop rather than an exhibition space. The travel agency aesthetic also suggested a space for those with time and financial means, which limited organic interactions.

However, we found that direct performative acts, such as play and storytelling, created the most meaningful exchanges. This led us to conclude that to push the boundaries of commercial space as an artistic medium, we needed clearer messaging or more dynamic interventions bridging the interior and exterior.

In the metro, we encountered new challenges and opportunities. The metro is primarily a functional space where people are focused on navigating the urban landscape. Many visitors initially approached our space seeking directions or help, while others, particularly elderly and homeless individuals, sought human connection, revealing the metro’s role beyond transit.

This ambiguity worked to our advantage. The lack of immediate recognition as an art space invited unexpected engagement. By blending into the metro’s natural flow, we disrupted commuters’ routines, turning them into unwitting collaborators in our artistic exploration.