How to Build a Telescope borrows its name from an instruction manual the artist discovered in his family home in an isolated, agricultural region of Portugal. Whether literal or metaphorical, the concept of “how to build a telescope” balances a provocative duality—between playful curiosity and scientific innovation—encouraging the viewer to reflect on the resistance of slower-paced technologies in the face of mass production. Using the rural setting as a visual playground, Trancoso draws on the original book to explore absurdities that reveal the universal in the personal and the cosmic in the mundane.