MDGPE’s Annual Exhibition: a critical laboratory on display at the Museum Gallery
An archive only exists when it is accessed, interpreted, and updated. It is under this premise that the Master’s Degree in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects (MDGPE) opens, on October 2nd, the exhibition “Arquivo Material / Material Archive”, on view at the FBAUP Museum Gallery until October 9th, 2026.
The annual exhibition acts as the consolidation of a research laboratory where 1st and 2nd year students explore digital and material ecosystems. By having designed the artifacts and the designing and producing the exhibition display itself, students practice their role as cultural mediators. At a time when digital saturation and algorithms reduce the space for nuance, the presented works propose recovering alterity and embracing the materiality of interactions, using deceleration as resistance to contemporary fragmentation.
From Invisible Narratives to Social Action
The first year of MDGPE acts a testing platform for intervening in the social fabric. Through a strong intersection of disciplines—from Editorial Design to Type Design, through Art Direction and Information Design—current and future designers use print and digital media to rewrite micro and macro-narratives.
Within the multiple relationships enabled by this collection presentation, clear and urgent lines of research sem to emerge. Ones such as Identity and Rights — work proposals that deconstruct gender norms through visual atlases, document the uncredited work of women in Portuguese design history, and combat contemporary civic apathy through campaigns demanding active participation in democracy. Or proposals like Archive and Decoloniality — highlighting a rigorous effort in analyzing Portuguese visual culture and preserving material and immaterial heritage. Notable examples include the curatorial retrieval of Luso-African music in vinyl records, in-depth documentation of manufacturing industry/ies, and the mapping of Madeiran embroidery. But these are just a few examples of many that can be found in the exhibition.
Morphology as Message
Simultaneously, the theme of returning to a more material interaction, with the senses and the body — in an embodied design approach — materializes in a formal exploration where media become the message itself. Moving away from standardized formats, the exhibition reveals artifacts that explore the limits of their materiality: the immediate ephemerality of digital interfaces is crystallized into editorial objects that transform rapid screen consumption into a physical and sequential experience, requiring a new physical posture from the reader for temporal mapping. Botany is communicated in an organic editorial object that mimics plant anatomy using translucent papers and exposed spines. Here we hope you’ll be able to find the intersection between digital — perceptible in typefaces exploring pixel degradation — and the raw physicality of typographic projects inspired by the texture of wood, lead and concrete.
A Living Archive
“Material Archive” celebrates the plurality of solutions from a diverse class cohort of students. All, while coexisting through introspective visual essays, theoretical research, and practical visual identity, communication or editorial projects. A space granted for the exploration of practices that blend Computational Design and Digital Desktop Publishing approaches with oficinal analog craftsmanship.
The works that will soon be inaugurated showcase a generation prepared not to feed visual saturation, but to design the human experience with ethics and impact. We invite the entire community to visit, read, and interact with this collection.
Practical Information:
Exhibition: Arquivo Material / Material Archive — MDGPE Projects 2025-26
Dates: October 2 to 9, 2026
Opening: Friday, October 2, 2026, 5:00 PM
Location: Museum Gallery, Faculty of Fine Arts of U.Porto
Admission: Free