Absolute Derive started in Lisbon in 2017 as a one-person practice. Mariana Fonseca had spent the previous eight years working inside organisations, first at a municipal urban regeneration agency in Porto, then as head of strategy at a mid-sized cultural foundation in Lisbon's Mouraria neighbourhood. She was good at the work, but she kept noticing the same problem: organisations would hire expensive consultants who arrived with a ready-made framework, applied it regardless of context, and left before anyone could tell whether it had worked. She started Absolute Derive to do the opposite.

Mariana Fonseca founded Absolute Derive in Lisbon in 2017 after eight years working inside organisations rather than advising them from the outside. She began at Porto's municipal urban regeneration agency, where she managed community consultation for three large-scale neighbourhood projects in Campanhã. She then moved to Lisbon as head of strategy at a cultural foundation in Mouraria, where she spent five years before deciding that the most useful thing she could do was work across organisations rather than inside one. She reads a lot of urban theory, walks the city most mornings before the office opens, and is a reliable presence at the Cinemateca Portuguesa on Friday evenings.