Light Shadows of Serenity
Francisco Braga
José Cerdeira
I am an artist, architect and drawing teacher whose practice expands across an interdisciplinary field of references. I hold a master’s degree in architecture from the Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto, where all members of our team also studied, both of the other members working as practicing architects. Alongside architecture, my background has been rooted in the arts, - from studying Fine Arts in Porto to developing a personal practice that includes painting, drawing, tattooing, photography, video, and music.
During my exchange program in Norway, I worked with Oslo Architecture Triennale and also began teaching drawing workshops with the National Museum of Norway, a project that continues today and marked the beginning of my interest in co-participatory artistic processes. I now lead the creative direction of our emerging art and architecture collective (CAALM), where we develop site-specific projects at the intersection of community, territory, and material memory. One of our current works 'do Mar' translates local drawings into ceramic wall pieces along the Portuguese coast, involving municipalities and their communities in the creation of lasting poetic art-installations.
My master’s thesis Light Shadows of Serenity received the highest distinction and was nominated among the finalists for the Archiprix Best Portuguese Architecture Thesis of 2025, and it became a starting point for other aforementioned projects such as the 'Câmara Serena'.
My main interests lie in practices such as being in nature, reading, biking, listening to full-albums as well as appreciating the act of not doing anything. I am currently based in Copenhagen, working independently as a freelance artist and tattooist, while traveling both to Oslo and Porto according to the project's needs.
I seek to continue expanding my interdisciplinary practice and network across borders, even more so when applied for the betterment of the common-good.
Light Shadows of Serenity is a constellation of architectural and artistic explorations that investigates how space, light, and time can reconnect our inner self to the external world. Initiated during my master’s thesis (at Södra Älvsborg Psychiatric Clinic, in 2023/24) this project began as a reflection on how a symbiotic relationship between architecture and nature, can promote moments of deep presence and psychic healing. Rooted in the ancient gesture of entering darkness to see more clearly, I propose a continuation of this work through immersive and co-participatory experiences.
These inhabitable pinhole spaces function as perceptual instruments, where the outside world is inverted and projected inward, offering a fragile but profound experience of seeing. During the thesis process, I developed ‘Câmara Serena’, a hybrid between architectural model and pinhole camera which records internal projections of light using photosensitive paper, giving the autonomy to interior space when expressing its relationship to the external environment.
This methodology has since expanded: in Norway, through a pinhole drawing workshop with children at Kristiansand’s Hospital; in Portugal, through a contemplative homage to Álvaro Siza’s Capela do Monte. These small-scale works invite collective reflection and emotional resonance. Spaces where light slows, shadows stretch, and the act of seeing the unseen becomes a tangible collective experience.
At its core, this project asks: How can architecture mediate the alignment between the inner-self and the outer-world?
Today’s ecological and social crises are not only material, they are deeply ruled by unresolved aspects of the human psyche, that dissociated, collapse under the pressure of perceived reality. Having our "search for meaning" being drawn to a halt, we fabricate illusions and indulge in distractions that further separate us from our common source, where both 'I' and 'We' is one and the same.