DWELLERS

Set mainly in Lisbon and Casablanca, with short impressions from Porto and Rabat, DWELLERS does not compare habitats, but blends them and lets them reflect through each other, showing legacy and contemporary structures → In Portugal, the urgency and idealism of the post-revolutionary years are embedded in the structures created in the context of SAAL, shaped by collaborations between architects and residents at a time when housing was a collective claim. Also estates like Cinco Dedos preserve these traces of unfinished utopias.

What we see happening in the 20th century is that urban design becomes more and more democratic, and the agency of those people who are living in the neighborhoods that are planned becomes more and more important.

Prof. Tom Avermaete, Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design at ETH Zürich

In Casablanca, the modernist complexes of Carrières Centrales and Ain Diab reflect a different history, where visions of international style intertwined with the logics of colonial governance.  Across both cities, the housing estates have not remained static but shifted through the daily actions and movements of those who inhabit them, incorporating new features, uses, forms, and meanings over time → DWELLERS intermixes voices from contemporary architects and scholars who emphasise that architecture is not fixed, but part of an ongoing negotiation between space, memory, and necessity.   

An exceptional moment, where experimenting with new typologies was possible, responses to new ways of living, the introduction of public housing in government policies all over Europe, but on the downside, some cities, or parts of cities, got hyper specified in functional terms. 

Samuel Gonçalves, SUMMARY, on architecture in the post-WW2 period

DWELLERS follows four residents from both locations respectively. Each of them is leaving to go somewhere. They are about to embark on their journey, and the film is following along → The cities are as busy and chaotic as always, but the journeys slow down time and there is a soothing flow instead. Urban structures appear not as static backdrops but as vital organisms, repositories of constraint versus resistance, invention, and collective memory. 

Back then it was an urgency, now it is still an urgency, but today we have more tools and more possibilities to give better answers, but I don't know if we are giving them, because we need to be more rational and economical and do not have the time to review and put the typologies into perspective.

Lucinda Correia, on the evolution of the architectural practice in Portugal

As an ongoing collaboration between Anders Khan Bolin and Martin Konzett, DWELLERS is shaped through slow cinema, embedded fieldwork, and a minimal production footprint. Long takes and ambient sequences, approaching city life not as a closed case studies but an interwoven open text: alive, questioning, and in motion. DWELLERS becomes a visual essay and an invitation to reconsider how we inhabit, transform, and dream within the urban fabric.