Seminário de Residências Artísticas: Ponto(s) de Situação

Since the arrival of AiR programs as a global phenomenon in the last decades of the 20th century, there has been a confirmed tendency in the growth and diversification of this operative model, both nationally and internationally. The present event, open to public participation, seeks to convoke a wide array of voices and approaches for a broadened debate on the current state of artistic residencies in Portugal, reflecting the multifaceted and multifunctional character of the agents and practices typically mobilized by this model.

Providing a historical perspective on which to anchor a contextualization of the cultural and artistic sphere in Portugal, this seminar is focused on the contemporary affirmation of AiR programs as a privileged vehicle for the promotion od artistic creation, but also as a platform for political, social and economic activism. Thus, we have invited a group pf 12 speakers – researchers, artists, teachers, curators and other representatives of cultural institutions – for a debate structured by 4 theme panels:

1. Portuguese travelling artists: from humanism journey to the cultural travel;

2. Artist-in residence programs in Portugal: a genealogy;

3. Artistic production, Heritage and placemaking;

4. The artivist perspective(s): collaboration, intervention, and mobilization.


The seminar will take place on may 19 and 20, 2022, at Carpintarias de São Lázaro, with the support of Centro de Estudos e Investigações em Belas-Artes (CIEBA) - Universidade de Lisboa, Centro de Investigação em Ciência e Tecnologia das Artes (CITAR) - Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT) and Academia Gerador.

Each participant will receive a certificate of participation.

STATES OF PLAY is part of the programming vector "We would like to add" by Carpintarias de São Lázaro.

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OPENING SESSION | 05.19

11.30 am — Carpintarias de São Lázaro: artistic residencies
Fernando Belo


11.45 am — From art to heritage, from heritage to art, and so on
Laura Castro

A brief reflection on how art and heritage are related, understood as practices, entities, cultural institutions that live in convergence, superposition, challenge, confrontation, opposition, validation, stimulus. When art inhabits heritage and heritage inhabits art, they appear as interchangeable shelters.


12 pm — Brief notes for thinking about the Artistic Residency
Susana Gastal

Talking about <artistic residence> supposes considering, besides the artistic, movement and locus. The first supposes the question of displacement. The second refers to the temporary change of place. If theorists include as "artistic residence", for example, the stay of Leonardo da Vinci in the Loire Valley, by invitation, to create freely there (Batista, 2008), the issue has been sharpened in the context of contemporary art, with proposals in terms of private patronage and public policies. Having said these considerations, the present proposes to bring to discussion the Annual Fine Arts Fair, promoted in the southern Brazilian city of Rio Pardo, during the Holy Week. If in the first editions (1974-1975) the presence of groups of artists was restricted to Thursdays and Fridays, in the years that followed the number of days of presence in the city increased, producing works in the techniques of drawing, painting and engraving.


12.15 pm — Of the displacements and fixations of artists - why residencies?
Fernando Rosa Dias

Throughout the history of art there has always been a dialectic between the artist's fixation in a place of work, on a construction site or in an atelier, or of displacements, for work, for training, for the pleasure of learning to travel, among others. Through brief examples of this vast dialectic, more complete than tense, we will address some reasons for the current need for artistic residencies.
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12.30 pm — Convocarte Release No. 14/15: ART AND MOBILITY: Eppur si muove!
Fernando Rosa Dias (FBAUL/CIEBA), Susana Gastal (UCS) and Bruna Lobo (FBAUL/CIEBA)

12.45 pm — Publication of the Artistic Residencies Seminar: States of Play Contexts, Mappings and Programming Strategies
Diogo Freitas da Costa (FBAUL/CIEBA)


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KEYNOTE | 19.05

2 pm — The Foreign Guest. The Resident Artists in the National Arts Plan schools
Paulo Pires do Vale

What is the place of the arts and the artist in school? From Pasolini's film, "Teorema", I will try to give some answers to this question, explaining what we propose with the "Resident Artist" measure of the National Arts Plan.

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PANEL 1 | 19.05

2.30 pm — Portuguese traveling artists: from the humanist journey to the cultural journey.
Convener Bruna Lobo

The concept of artistic residency is contemporary. Despite this, we know that in earlier times there were organizations, such as scholarships and Art Academies, which already sowed similar practices. In this sense, the historical rescue can broaden the notions about characteristics inherent to the Artist Residencies, beyond their formative inclination, but point to fundamental issues related to creation and displacement. This proposal does not consider these trips as anticipations of Artist Residencies, but as social practices that enrich the understanding of the artists' movement for residencies in the contemporary scenario.

— Manuel San-Payo: Drawing and Distance; the Travel Notebook

Drawing, a record of the transience and the ephemeral, is, in itself, movement.
The artist/designer and the social mobility. Art and circles of power and their circulation. Confraternities and workshops. Pattern and Model Notebooks: the search for the canon. Seeing without being seen: the foreigner and the frontier. The philosophical journey, Empires, and Colonies (the exotic distant). Grand Tour, industrial tourism, and mass tourism. The artist's path turned into merchandise.

— Maria João Castro: The foreigner saw by the Portuguese travelers of the Belle Époque

The great movement of leisure travel that took place in the 19th century arrived late in Portugal, mainly due to the influence of the geopolitical vicissitudes of the first half of the 19th century, especially the French invasions and the consequent refuge of the Portuguese court in Brazil, as well as the war subsequent liberal civil. In this changing atmosphere, the dimension of foreigners has become, for nationals, an imperative that is more desired and sung than lived, so it is only towards the end of the century that the necessary conditions will be met for some Portuguese to pack their bags and leave abroad. . On the other hand, internal trips were not promoted much due to a poorly informed and poor society, as well as the late implementation of the train, the lack of support structures (road, hotel, and leisure) and generalized illiteracy that prevented the realization of viatic wanderings within the country itself.
Therefore, travelers were rare and their testimonies (literary, and artistic) even scarcer, a fact that makes the existing ones a precious legacy to (re-)think the Portuguese Belle Époque. These, above all, are not so much interested in the testimony of their wandering around the world but above all in what they said about themselves through the eyes of the “other”.
This reflection thus intends to highlight the uniqueness of some of these trips, inserting them in the light of the cultural-artistic context of their time in a Europe at that time in complete mutation but whose echoes and drifts took a long time to reach the western tip of the Old Continent.

— Mário Linhares: Sketch Tour Portugal

Travel and draw or travel to draw?
This communication presents the Sketch Tour Portugal project, conceived and implemented in partnership with Turismo de Portugal and Urban Sketchers. For the time of the trip to merge with that of the visit to the destination, a holistic aspect was sought in capturing the senses. In addition to a travel diary with drawings and writing, soundscapes, video images, and photography were also recorded, gastronomic tastings were provided, as well as the collection of geological remains.
Not all people travel and draw. Fewer still are those who travel just to draw. But any traveler feels the urge to record something and, without knowing it, also leaves a record, even if it is the carbon footprint.

— Michela Degortes: In Rome be Roman. The artists' journey, residence, and social strategy in the cosmopolitan capital of the arts between the 18th and 19th centuries.

The feeling of sublime exaltation in the face of the encounter with Rome, the capital of the classical world and travel destination for artists and intellectuals, was suggestively expressed by Johann Wolfgang Goethe in 1786: “I am not here just for pleasure; I want to immerse myself in the study of this magnificence, I want, before I am forty years old, to instruct and cultivate my spirit». With the same enthusiasm and with the aim of improving their own learning, artists from all backgrounds, including the Portuguese, traveled to Rome, consolidating a tradition that reached its apex between the late 1800s and the first quarter of the 19th century. These would not only immerse themselves in the magnificence emphasized by Goethe, but also in a cosmopolitan environment where cultures, languages ​​, and different artistic trajectories crossed, an inspiring and creative context, but also characterized by fierce competition. This brief contribution proposes a look at the dynamics of the artists' residence in Rome between the 18th and 19th centuries, seeking to highlight the elements of their sociability and the strategies for approaching patrons and buyers.

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PANEL 2 | 19.05

4.45 pm — Artist-in-residence programs in Portugal: a genealogy
Convener Diogo Costa

Just as modernism, in its successive avant-gardes, was dominated by the projection into a future time and by the operationalization of the concept of rupture, we can say - in the wake of an analysis proposed by Hal Foster (1996) - that contemporary art, in its turning of the "Discourse around the medium for discourse-centered projects" (1996:xi), has often found itself entangled in a perpetual presentism, somehow breaking a critical coordination between a diachronic - or historical dimension - and synchronic axis - or social dimension - of art. This perspective helps us to understand why some of the debates and discourses built around the model of Artistic Residency, as it has emerged and asserted itself over the past three decades, have sometimes still shown resistance to readings centered on continuity phenomena and identification of genealogies. This panel proposes, precisely, to contribute toward a contextualization of the contemporary phenomenon of artistic residencies in Portugal, anchored in a retroactive gaze that - rather than a negative exercise of retroversion - can be an element toward approximating and exponentiating a present situation.

— Bernardo Pinto e Abreu: Pico do Refúgio - Artistic Residency

The Pico do Refúgio artist residency program began in 2015 on a 400-year-old farm located on the island of São Miguel, in the Azores. Since then, Pico do Refúgio has served as a creative platform for dozens of artists from the most distinct areas and nationalities. Perpetuating the artistic past of this location, especially during the period when the farm was the residence of sculptor, and teacher, Luísa Constantina, the program is dedicated to supporting national and foreign artists in their research and work in the Azores, promoting the creation and dissemination of contemporary art. Through its resident artists and their works, this program has also achieved the goal of promoting the Azores around the world as a place where nature, sustainability, and cultural heritage coexist with an emerging and thriving artistic dynamic.

— Isabel Nogueira: The 70s in Portugal: Modernity, collective events, Revolution, neovanguard

The 1970s in Portugal were marked by the April Revolution of 1974, which put an end to 48 years of dictatorship. From the artistic point of view, there was already a clear modernity, operated by artists who wanted to be unequivocally modern, regardless of their geopolitical and cultural condition. On the other hand, there was also an intersection between the artistic tendencies of the international neo-avant-garde that were also asserting themselves among us, with an art that reflected on the Revolution and mirrored it. At the same time, a set of relevant collective events took shape, which would also be a keynote of the decade, foreshadowing various forms of artistic aggregation. This paper focuses on the 1970s in Portugal, making a brief reflection on the intersection of these defining aspects.

— João Paulo Queiroz: The paths of a journey: artistic residencies in perspective

From the Grand Tour to the boarders of the academies, from the air-librarians to the scholarship holders of the 19th-20th century, to the more contemporary interventions in communities, there are moments of reflection and brilliance that reposition the artist in the territory. We can propose lines of construction and articulation of discourses, yesterday and today, in confrontation with the journey and the territory in current contexts.

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PANEL 3 | 20.05

11 am — Artistic production, Heritage and placemaking
Convener Ana Gago

In “Ten Principles of Values-Based Heritage Practice” (2019), Kate Clark highlighted the increasing number of voices and practices around Heritage Studies, coming from diversified backgrounds, including “architects and surveyors, curators, planners, archivists, ecologists” (2019: 151), among others.
Countless international symposiums, research and/or artistic projects have already been devoted to exploring the potentialities, for instance, in the cross-fertilization between artistic creation and heritage education, demonstrating that artists could also undeniably be added to this ever- expanding list of heritage practitioners.
In this regard, artist-in-residence programs seem to provide an opportunity to call upon artists to (re)interpret heritage, encouraging interdisciplinary and participatory approaches. Particularly considering Portuguese reality, heritage-based artistic residencies are, in fact, a growing trend, placing intangible heritage as the preferential leitmotif for artistic creation and incorporating a high degree of interdisciplinarity associated with this type of initiatives, including practices bordering creative industries.
In this panel, we will address this particular phenomenon, through (very) different examples of artist-in-residence programs, although devoted to objects and practices that could all fit into multiple heritage typologies (although, most of the time, not -classified).
How can artistic creation contribute to heritage making process, associated, for instance, with placemaking strategies? How can artists act to counter them? Can artists (really) bring new approaches (and new practices) to/of heritage?

— Álvaro de Brito Moreira & Samuel Silva: Deslocações — Artistic-pedagogical Residencies

​The artistic and pedagogical residences project Deslocações, as the name suggests, seeks to provide a temporary meeting place/moment between the museological context, the International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture | Abade Pedrosa Municipal Museum in Santo Tirso, and the educational environment, the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, through the temporary transfer of the classroom space to the museum or other related heritage realities. This movement introduces a process of de-installation and functional reconfiguration of the work processes giving way to the construction of new experiences: the students are confronted with the possibility of facing a space full of meanings transporting their introspective systems of creation to the confrontation with the museological, architectural, historical, social, political and territorial context; the Museum and its team are inhabited by new presences transforming their dynamics and daily routines configuring a privileged moment of learning and interaction, relevant for the development of their skills and capacity of response and adaptation.

— Andreia Garcia: Alliances between human beings, generations, species and knowledge to save the future.

The communication focuses on the first edition of the Art(e)facts Biennale, which was born from the idea of creating collaborations between Portuguese and foreign artists, architects and designers, with artisans from the Beira Interior region. The intention will be to present this way of caring for the intangible memory of the territory from dialogues for the construction of a contemporary heritage of works and processes of artistic knowledge, focusing on the valorization of the region and the reinterpretation of traditional knowledge, in a way deeply rooted in the territory, and in a constellation of practices and imaginaries that instigate all generations to think of a more habitable planet today.

— Lara Seixo Rodrigues: Corpus Cultural Interior: identity as raw material

— Raquel Belchior: For those who walk on the waters of the sea. An itinerant project through the fishing communities

Making a project is like weaving a net. In fact, we could describe the whole process of artistic creation using fishing metaphors. Could it be because with fishermen, artists share this capacity for resistance in the face of a sea that is not always friendly? Someone told us on the water's edge: fishing is a matter of faith...
The net that characterizes By those who walk on the waters of the sea is made of a literary and communal mesh, of traveling knots, made of encounters, listening, and presence.
When we stretch the cable we observe the small links that make it up and that are all the territories the net has passed through, from the docks to the municipal stages, from the religious festivals by the river to the rehearsal rooms where Brandão's words and ethnographic research intersected. This was an itinerant project, which put very diverse people and institutions in the same boat, and that was only possible in this shared effort.

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PANEL 4 | 20.05

2 pm — Artivist perspectives: collaboration, intervention and mobilization
Convener Ana Gago

Contemporary artists are often proposed as mediators, engaging with local communities, and, thus, contributing to multiple (political) agendas; from the promotion of cultural participation to cultural placemaking.
In this panel, we will focus on the Portuguese reality, analyzing different examples of artistic practices and, more specifically, of artist-in-residence programs, proposing a perspective on the development of participatory and artivist approaches, since the 1970’s to the present day.
What’s the importance of being in the local community to create change?


— Hugo Cruz: Artistic Practices and Participation in the context of cultural programming

Artistic practices focusing on the participatory dimension have come, especially in recent years, to be configured as a territory that gathers a growing interest, translated into a diverse and intense production, both practical and theoretical. This movement develops in different geographies and has highlighted its epistemological and methodological hybridity as a central aspect, integrating contributions from different disciplinary confluences. The construction of these artistic practices has taken place in a double sense: on the one hand, contemporary artistic creation has deepened its participatory dimension, on the other hand, education and community and social intervention have resorted to artistic languages as an alternative to more conventional approaches. This trend, in addition to creation, expanded to the context of cultural programs requiring the activation of specific devices and strategies, namely in the connection established with civic and political participation.

— Luís Gomes da Costa: Unlikely encounters with ordinary life

A long time ago, in the mid-1970s, when there was still no electricity in many mountain villages in Beira Alta, it was common to hear unlikely stories told by elders. These stories included the wanderings of local dissident characters such as beggars, wandering musicians, blind farmers, mysterious witches, devilish priests, and people returning from the realm of the dead to check on their properties. In a way, these stories and being able to be close to people who lived essentially the same way as two centuries before, highlight human characteristics present in rural contexts, such as being resourceful, empathetic, honest, and free to imagine. and share unorthodox ideas and stories, in a permanent awareness of the fragility of life and the lasting presence of the past and nature around their communities. We are, therefore, on a slightly different plane from what would today be called cultural heritage, a choice, and reduction of the social and cultural complexity of places to some aspects with a negotiable value beyond the borders of specific sociocultural contexts.
Many years later, in 2006, we decided to found Binaural Nodar, a project to welcome and create artistic and social research in a rural context. In a way, starting to invite international experimental artists to work and interact with the local context and, more importantly, with local communities, was a humble tribute to the generations of dissidents who lived and wandered in remote Beira villages, while assuming that the art is still one of the few areas of human activity where idiosyncrasies and “strange” ideas can be accepted and understood. Specifically, the Lafões Cult Lab artist residency project starts, among other aspects, with the identification of counter-values ​​present in local contexts that distance themselves from a certain progressive optimism based on technological change and infinite economic growth, doing so through a curatorial practice that identifies themes and places of investigation, questioning some very current tensions, such as between permanence and change, between artist and community, between local and global, between perennial and ephemeral, between manual and intellectual, practical and poetic, between rational and irrational, between understanding and misunderstanding, etc.

— ​​Rui Mourão: Counter-representations to the musealization of indigenous human bodies: From the artistic residency to the website

Despite a growing public debate, many European museums continue to hold in their collections objects from other cultures acquired in colonial contexts. This is a history of almost two centuries, often far from institutional agendas, but the movement for the decolonization of museums starts from the premise that the past is not over yet. The past is thought of as a contested field, whose interpretation has historically been decided by some to the detriment of others. Since the museum is a device that builds and naturalizes representations, it can never be a neutral space. It is shaped by power relations.
In this context, the project O TEMPO DAS HUACAS started from an artistic residency at the Carmo Archaeological Museum but continued in a non-institutional way with a process of artistic, scientific, and ethical questioning about the exhibition of mummified bodies of indigenous people in this museum. It brought together critical collaborations, proposals for dialogue, and counter-representations that open up a plurality of perspectives for thinkers, museum professionals, and artists (especially contemporary indigenous artists). The result was gathered on a website that is simultaneously an exhibition space and an archive, a forum, and a stage, reflection, and artivism.
In short, O TEMPO DAS HUACAS invites a non-musealized look at the museum that reflects on body(s), image(s), and narrative(s) in their complexity, diversity, intersubjectivity, and interculturality. It begins by recognizing historically constructed imbalances to imagine how new modes of relationship can be woven, inside and outside museums, with art and in life.

— Virgínia Fróis: Deformatting: to create a network of possibilities

How is informal learning constituted as flexible learning and established as lifelong evolutionary processes?
Beyond the academic training of these students what are the implications of these experiences in their current professional life? We will address three examples of activities carried out in residence with FBA.UL students.
- 1: From the Projetar Rio to the Mala com pés em Cabo Verde in Trás os Montes in the municipality of Tarrafal de Santiago work with the school in 2006 and in 2008;
- 2: Telheiro / Pottery Workshop: a ring under construction 2011;
- 3: Guizos / Aveiro International Biennale of ceramics 2019.

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Scientific Committee

- Fernando Rosa Dias: Assistant Professor, University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine Arts;

- Laura Castro: Assistant Professor, Catholic University of Portugal, School of Arts. Researcher at the Arts Science and Technology Research Center (CITAR);

- Susana Gastal: Professor at the University of Caxias do Sul.

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Organizing Committee

- Ana Gago: FCT Research Grant Holder (SFRH/BD/148865/2019) in the PhD program in Heritage Studies, at the Research Center for Science and Technology of Arts, School of Arts, Catholic University of Portugal.

​- Bruna Lobo: PhD student in Arts (Specialty Heritage Sciences) University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine Arts, collaborator researcher at Centro de Investigação e Estudos em Belas-Artes (CIEBA) Lisbon;

​- Diogo Freitas da Costa: FCT Research Grant Holder in the PhD program in Arts (Specialty Heritage Sciences) University of Lisbon, Faculty of Fine Arts; Guest Researcher at the Research and Study Center in Fine Arts (CIEBA).

- Fernando Belo: Diretor das Carpintarias de São Lázaro.