Performances no contemporâneo

Performances no Contemporâneo

Philosophy and Arts

Performances in the Contemporary is a research project — carried out in a laboratory format and through gatherings of thought — whose aim is to bring together a set of voices and approaches to performance and the performing arts as accomplices and bearers of a politics of the contemporary. In the expanded field of performance and performativity, margins, movement, mobilization, landscape, archive, discourse, and various strategies of command and destruction emerge as materials for a debate on the potential and political body.
At the intersection between practice and theory, this project, created in 2015, seeks to question the condition of the contemporary and to create a corpus of events that document the work developed within a space of tensional thought between philosophy and the arts. In the paradoxical relationship of adherence and distancing from the real, in visibility and invisibility, in light and darkness — as Giorgio Agamben refers to regarding contemporaneity as a singular relation with time — the performances also arise as singular projects of marginal worlds and forms of resistance.
We are interested in a mode of contemporary thought voiced in the first person, in the speaking body of art, to use Mário Perniola’s expression. We are interested in the direct discourses of those who produce artworks, as well as those who think about and interfere with art.

3 November
Emídio Agra
Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro
Jorge Palinhos
Rossana Fonseca

FLUP – Meeting Room (2nd Floor) / Main Amphitheatre
Institute of Philosophy | University of Porto

Jardin des Oiseaux

Emídio Agra

In this cycle Performances in the Contemporary, I will present a set of videos, made by Ana Pissarra and José Nascimento, based on my work — a constellation of objects entitled Jardin des Oiseaux. It consists of an aged, discarded world — a world of broken things, debris, and fragments of the everyday — which are continually transformed and reconstructed. It is about reading history through its own decay, about a silenced past that speaks in its own voice, revealing a frail hope, a fleeting image of happiness within a hopeless world.
These objects invite us to focus on details, on blind spots, where theme and content do not coincide, and where content does not align with a philosophy injected from the outside — where the unintentional reveals the multiple, the non-identical, corroding what exhausts itself in immediate signification. More than symbolic, these objects are allegorical. In them, each element stands for itself. They show their fissures rather than forming an organic whole. They are, as T. W. Adorno would say, “a hieroglyph whose key has been lost.”

Emídio Agra is a visual artist with a PhD in Philosophy (Aesthetics) from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona and a degree in Fine Arts – Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. His solo exhibitions include Jardin des Oiseaux (CAAA, Guimarães, 2025), Jardin des Oiseaux – a first constellation of this garden of birds (DuplaCena77, Lisbon, 2024), and L’éternité par les astres (Sismógrafo, Porto, 2019). Group shows include Anuário 19 (Galeria Municipal do Porto, 2020) and Não é ainda o mar (Sismógrafo, 2018). Since 2020 he has been part of Sismógrafo’s team, curating the conference cycle Imagens de Pensamento and editing and translating the associated notebooks.

Spaces, Borders, Flesh and Skin – A Contribution to the Idea of a Situated Embodiment

Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro

The aim of this presentation is to deconstruct the notion of the body as a confined space and to understand the notion of the border as something that exists only when activated by moving bodies. Irit Rogoff states that the border is the passage itself, and it is through the ways its crossing is limited that situated embodiment takes the form of resistance. This presentation will reflect on works by artists who, directly or indirectly, embody this notion in their practice.

Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro graduated in Sculpture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and holds a PhD by Project from Chelsea College. She taught at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London for about a decade. She regularly exhibits as an artist in diverse contexts in and outside Portugal. Her curatorial work has involved institutional collections as well as alternative exhibition spaces, including the Art and Architecture Programme of Guimarães 2012 – European Capital of Culture. She maintains regular editorial activity, including several artist publications. She has taught at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto since 2004, where she is an Integrated Member of i2ADS – Research Institute in Art, Design and Society – and, since 2007, director of the Master’s Degree in Art and Design for Public Space. Her interests encompass artistic practice, art education, research, and critical writing.

Cartography for a Biography

Rossana Fonseca

Cartography for a Biography constitutes an artistic research project that emerged as one of the developments of the doctoral thesis Perception, Time and Memory in the Genesis of Photography. Through images in constant derealization, texts in perpetual recombination, and traces of paths repeated multiple times, the project seeks to outline an anachronic cartography where time ceases to be succession and linearity to become fragment, suspension, interval. The articulation between text and image forms the core of this process — not as mutual illustration, but as an interwoven fabric where both become sensitive surfaces upon which time seems to materialize, and where concept and image interlace, displace, complete, or resist one another. In this undefined territory between seeing and reading, between making images and writing, a language is rehearsed that explores the plasticity of text and the materiality of photography as simultaneous spaces of inscription and erasure.

Rossana Mendes Fonseca is a visual artist, curator, and researcher. She holds a PhD in Contemporary Art from the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra, studied Photography at Spéos Paris International School of Photography, and obtained a Master’s in Artistic Studies – Art Theory and Criticism from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. Her work emerges from the dialogue between image and thought, unfolding within the expanded field of photography as an unrelenting essay on time, perception, and memory. As a curator, she is dedicated to emerging artistic practices and develops her work mainly at CRU Creative Hub, where she has programmed and produced over 40 exhibitions. She is a member of the research group Aesthetics, Politics and Knowledge at the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Porto, and she teaches and writes on visual culture, aesthetics, and the technical image.

What to Do? Doubts about Action and Politics in Contemporary Performing Arts

Jorge Palinhos

Since Piscator, theatre has embraced the claim of being a political art. It had never been far from politics — as an art form dependent on audiences and authorities, it has always existed in the uneasy space between social conditions and collective imagination. Yet the 20th century made it a continuation of politics by other means, and the 21st century its last remaining space of freedom for minorities. In this brief presentation, I reflect on how language and action can still serve as the power of the performing arts in a time of massive distraction.

Jorge Palinhos is a writer and researcher. His works have been presented and/or published in Portugal, Brazil, Spain, the USA, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and Serbia. He received the Miguel Rovisco Prize (2003) and the Manuel Deniz-Jacinto Prize (2007), and was shortlisted for the Luso-Brazilian Theatre Prize António José da Silva (2011). In 2024, his play Um Pai was distinguished by the Eurodram network. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies with a thesis on contemporary Lusophone dramaturgy. He was playwright and dramaturg at Guimarães 2012 – European Capital of Culture, is a founding member of the collective AMANDA, dramaturg of the Belgian company Stand-up Tall, and associate artist of Visões Úteis. He is a researcher at the Arnaldo Araújo Research Centre, where he coordinates the Performing Arts Studies Group, and he is director of the Theatre course at the Escola Superior Artística do Porto.

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