And (Now and Then) the Mirror Cracked: O design entre o feminino, as margens e a ficção is a project that aimed to rethink and reformulate the way in which academic production in the Communication Design courses (bachelor and master), at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, is presented and communicated. In this sense, me and my colleagues Maria Proença, Raquel Gomes and Rodrigo Amâncio worked under principles that were governed by the exploration of presentation models for academic practices in Communication Design, in conjunction with the themes we wanted to convey, in order to create a presentation system that went beyond a simple compilation of works. We also developed the entire visual identity of the project, which consists of a publication and a website.

By understanding Communication Design as the result of a processual circuit that is dependent on multiple contexts, agents and voices, And (Now and Then) the Mirror Cracked questions and shifts, seeks new modes of action that see design through its critical potential and represents a discourse that moves its impact to clearly creative spaces, as they are formed as alternatives to traditional logics. The project is a space for the confluence of voices, as a space that carries academically created narratives, their intersections and the discourse that emerges from them. It views the formation of this transversal discourse as a territory of circulation that expands and transgresses the limits of the academy where it was formed.

But rather than representing closed projects, this process is driven by the intersections between the reflections they provoke and the voices that triggered their narratives, in an exchange that is never really over. In addition, the project (re)views design and the discourse emerging from its logics through the lens of the feminine, seeing the formation of this discourse as the creation of a counter-history, as the reformulation of the canon and of our relationship with reality.

The lens of the feminine allows us to open up our field of vision and understand it as a transgression against dominant discourses and the models for receiving this discourse. It's a rupture that refers to the project's title, which derives from Anneke Smelik's And The Mirror Cracked (1998), and to which a parallel is added.