The story began at the start of 2026, when the School ARt Gallery project entered its pilot phase at Campos Melo Secondary School. Together with artists Tiago Hesp and Pei.xoto, the students began by exploring the school itself: its classrooms and corridors, its architecture, its machinery and the objects that reveal its different eras.
Rather than simply being given information about the school, the students were challenged to become observers. During their first session, they walked through the school with a teacher, paying attention to details that might normally go unnoticed—corners, textures, objects, photographs and traces of everyday life. They recorded what they discovered through photographs, drawings and notes.
Back in the classroom, a simple but fundamental question guided the next stage of the project: What is school?
And, more specifically, how can a school be represented through its history and through the passage of time?
The students became active participants in answering these questions. Their observations and ideas formed the foundations of the artistic process, while a workshop with Pei.xoto introduced them to Adobe After Effects and the possibilities of animation and digital typography. From the very beginning, the project was conceived as a meeting point between physical and digital forms of expression.
Drawing time
In February, the students continued their exploration together with artist Tiago Hesp, turning their attention to one of the most fundamental forms of artistic expression: drawing.
The activities deliberately slowed the creative process down. Through slow-drawing exercises on porous surfaces, the students were encouraged to rediscover drawing as a way of observing, recording and understanding the world around them.
They were also challenged to deconstruct familiar objects and rethink what they believed they already knew. Objects connected to different moments in the school’s history became starting points for new forms and new interpretations.
The drawings were then transformed through a collective process. Passed from hand to hand, they were traced, cut, layered and combined using tracing paper and collage. In this process, analogue techniques began to meet digital ideas.
What initially appeared to be a collection of separate experiments was gradually becoming the raw material for the mural—and for the digital layer that would eventually bring it to life.
From paper to wall
In March, the project moved from the classroom to the school walls.
The students, teachers and Tiago Hesp exchanged pencils and scissors for paintbrushes and began translating weeks of research, experimentation and discussion into a large-scale mural.
Working collaboratively, they represented the school as it exists today while maintaining a connection to the foundations of its past and the possibilities of its future.
The result was ESCOLA TEMPO: a visual representation of a place shaped by generations of students and teachers, by learning, technology, work and everyday life.
The mural reflects the idea that time is not simply something that passes. It is what connects the different layers of the school—its history, its present identity and the future that is continually being created.
From the wall to the screen
But ESCOLA TEMPO does not stop at the physical mural.
One of the defining elements of the School ARt Gallery project is the creation of a digital layer that allows the artwork to move beyond the static image. Using the augmented-reality platform Artivive, the mural becomes animated when viewed through a screen.
The wall represents a moment captured in time. The digital layer gives that moment movement and rhythm.
Machines begin to move again. The school’s objects and symbols are brought back to life. The movements repeat like a rhythm: the shuttle returns to the loom, gears turn, a pump is pressed, a lever is pulled, a key is struck. The past becomes animated through the technology of the present.
In this way, the augmented-reality experience becomes an extension of the mural’s central idea: time connects what was, what is and what is yet to come.
A school transformed by its students
For the 12th-grade art students who participated in the project, ESCOLA TEMPO is much more than a mural. It is a record of their creativity, their observations and their relationship with the school. It is also a lasting contribution to the place where they have learned and grown.
Through the School ARt Gallery project, the school itself became both the subject and the canvas. Its history provided the inspiration, its students provided the ideas and creativity, and art and technology provided new ways of interpreting and sharing that history.
The finished work now remains at Campos Melo Secondary School as a legacy of this collaboration—a reminder that art can transform not only spaces, but also the way we see and understand them.
And, thanks to augmented reality, the school does not simply preserve its past on the wall.
It keeps moving. It keeps breathing. It keeps learning.