Find your peace.
Make your craft.
Stay a little longer.
Y3S is a social vision to build the missing ‘Third Places’ for artists, makers and their communities — rooms to create, play records, get tattooed, cook together and talk late into the night.
Three letters,
one invitation.
Y3S is short for Your Third Space, a name that comes straight from a book: Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place.
It belongs to the people who come back. A place you can call yours without owning it.
Not home (the first place), not work (the second), but the room in between, where community happens.
Real rooms in Portugal and Mindelo, plus a shared space online. That's why our address is your3rd.space.
Say it out loud and it sounds like yes.
Yes to staying a little longer, to the work-in-progress, to the stranger who becomes a regular. In Cabo Verde there's a word for that welcome: morabeza.
The great
good place.
In 1989, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg wrote about the informal public places that hold a community together, and why modern life was losing them.
Family, privacy, rest.
Roles, schedules, productivity.
The café, the barbershop, the bar on the corner, the studio with the door left open. You go there by choice, and the people you meet there make it.
Oldenburg argued that these places give people what neither home nor work can: easy company, mixing between people who would never otherwise meet, and the feeling of belonging to a place. Losing them leaves people isolated and leaves neighbourhoods poorer.
Y3S takes the idea one step further, for artists and makers. Our rooms are part studio, part living room, part dancefloor. They're spread across two shores and linked by a digital community, so the conversation keeps going between visits.
- Neutral groundNo one has to play host. You come and go as you please.
- A levelerStatus outside the door matters less than what you bring to the table.
- Conversation is the main activityThe talk, the music, the work-in-progress: that's the event.
- Accessible & accommodatingEasy to reach, open when you need it, no appointment needed.
- The regularsFamiliar faces set the tone, and newcomers are welcomed in.
- A low profileHomely and unpretentious, never showy.
- The mood is playfulWit, music and laughter, never solemn.
- A home away from homeRoots, warmth and a sense of ownership. You feel it the moment you walk in.
Source: Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place (1989). Characteristics paraphrased.
Two shores,
four doors.
Two spaces in Portugal and two in Mindelo, on São Vicente, Cabo Verde. Each one is a live example of the third place, renovated by hand for its own mix of studio, sound and gathering. Open a space to see how it plays the idea.
The program.
Formats we're building around. Dates arrive with the newsletter. draft
- Side A — Make
- A1Residencies
Stay and work for a few weeks, in Portugal or Mindelo. Room, studio, and a community to show it to.
- A2Open studios
Doors open while the work is still wet. Drawing, print, photo, ink.
- A3Build diaries
Follow the renovations, learn the craft, lend a hand on work days.
- Side B — Gather
- B1Listening sessions & DJ nights
Soul, morna, funaná, electronic — records played the slow way, then not so slow.
- B2Flash days
Tattoo flash sheets, walk-ins and good company.
- B3The digital commons
An online room for the regulars — between visits, between shores.
Pull up
a chair.
We're opening the doors slowly. Leave your email and you'll get one letter a month: renovation news, residency calls, and the first invitations to the rooms.