“Il portale dei complimenti” (the compliment’s portal) is a heterotopic space designed to make us feel appreciated and valued and allow us to experience and imagine otherwise. 

The spaces we inhabit can often make us feel alienated, depersonalized and alone. These spaces are often built upon patriarchal, white supremacist, and surveilliance capitalism’s logics. 

Within the workshop “Island in the Ocean or an Ocean of Islands?” we used queer heterotopias as a tool to understand what constitutes belonging in our communities, and the outcome was a collective reflection on how to meet our needs in a co-designed space. After the workshop, fellow artist in residence Alessandro Truffa and I, were discussing how often these spaces we imagine to create alternatives end up just staying on paper: we decided then to transport some of these imagined elements to a more concrete level of reality. 

We then constructed ' il portale dei complimenti': a space that is simultaneously real and imaginative, and that allows us to experience the affects of belonging. The space can be visited by two or more people. A person can sit below the portal, close their eyes, while the companion(s) are encouraged to think of compliments, reflecting on what makes the person who is sitting special, what they appreciate of them or what connects them. They would then take a post-it and write down thoughts, compliments or even just a meaningful word, and stick it on or nearby who is sitting.  Visitors of the portal can read their notes, and sit with the feelings and affects experienced while receiving or giving compliments, and might want to translate these feelings into new ways to replicate these feelings in their own communities.