Drifting Signals, Lasting Traces

An international group exhibition presented as part of the inaugural program of Aea Space — the first physical home of Aea: Culture Initiative. It marks Aea’s ongoing commitment to researching modes of communication across borders, disciplines, and experiences, alongside an engagement with creative practices that take place outside established institutional frameworks.

Situated in the TIMS café & padaria within the Museu das Comunicações in Santos, one of Lisbon’s busiest and most diverse areas, Aea Space positions itself as a “city-facing” environment. It brings together conversations shaped by a range of lived experiences, including those formed by the isolation, displacement and migration, precarity, and broader conditions of social instability.

Within this setting, Drifting Signals, Lasting Traces focuses on what lingers beyond a visible, screen-driven understanding of communication. The exhibition draws on its often overlooked dimensions: from underground vegetation systems to embodied experience, and to infrastructures that remain largely absent from everyday discussions of networked systems, such as data centers and the resource extraction that sustain them.

Communication is approached here as a dispersed and non-linear process, subject to manipulation and imperfection—conditions that make it unreliable, but also human. Embedded within the busy daily flow of a café, the exhibition offers a moment to pause and consider the imprints such exchanges leave behind, and the ways they can produce lasting traces. Curated by Katya Savchenko, the exhibition features artists from the UK and Portugal: Camila Almeida, Anastasia Belinskaya, Inês Magalhães, Susana Rocha, Tiago Rocha Costa, and Syntheticduo (Anastasia Belinskaya & Polina Kravchenko). 

Aea: Culture Initiative is an independent, bottom-up creative laboratory and community of 80+ émigré practitioners working across cultures. Spanning visual arts, design, architecture, urbanism, education, media, and curation, it forms temporary collectives around shared inquiries. Aea translates research into public formats—exhibitions, talks, publications, and experimental programs.

Opening: May 26, 6:30 pm

Exhibition runs May 26 – August 23, 2026, 8:30 am –5:00 pm

Venue: Aea Space at TIMS café & padaria

Cover image: Pylon, 2025. Anastasia Belinskaya