In April 2010, the arts activist Elisa Santos started up the "Temporary Occupations" in Maputo. This was a contemporary arts projects, featuring powerful intervention in the city's public spaces. For the original event, the theme given to the artists, for display in everyday settings in Maputo, was that of architectural heritage. The "Occupations" were reprised in 2011, opening on the day marking the tenth anniversary of the attack on New York's twin towers, and the topic could not have been more explicit: to connect the precarious and even homespun nature of the interventions to the global meaning of the loss of security associated with the loss of freedom and citizenship, characteristic of our contemporary societies. In 2012, the event went ahead again, this time with sponsorship from the Gulbenkian Next Future and Development Aid Programmes, and involved art projects devoted to the theme of "Foreigners", mostly created in foreign spaces within the city of Maputo, such as embassies and the international airport.

In 2013, after gaining further experience from the intervention in Mindelo, we now have the "Occupations" in Lisbon. The event will not necessarily share the original purpose or even the look and feel of the first "Occupations". But considering the importance of the method and the relevance of much of the work produced, "Temporary Occupations - Documents" will be the documentary witness to a process, a recent physical archive, with objects or their replicas (produced over the last three years), gaining visibility for a set of pieces that clash or fit with the spaces they occupy and which act as a signpost to subsequent "Occupations".