The Desejar Academy: Wheels of Knowledge is one of the axes of the Desejar – Arts and Common Places Movement. It aims to generate exchanges of knowledge between and with different cultural, social, educational and environmental agents in Braga, as well as people linked to areas and themes identified as relevant by these agents, who will be invited to take part in this Academy.
NEXT WHEELS OF KNOWLEDGE
- 29, 30 and 31 October 2024
Is Paradise Here? Art and Public Space
Activating artists: Catarina Lacerda and Rodrigo Malvar
Guests: Helena Pires (CECS/UM and co-coordinator of the A Passeio Platform) and José Manuel Lourenço (Public Transport Driver)
Free, but registration required.
Sign up here.
Schedule:
29 October – 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
30 October – 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
31 October – 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm
SYNOPSIS:
Based on the concrete experience of Catarina Lacerda and Rodrigo Malvar in developing artistic processes in and with public space, we will open up practices, discussions, and future imaginaries for a different performative city. Using the question “Is Paradise here?” as a starting point, we will explore three locations in the city of Braga: a garden, a desolate area, and the urban centre. Engaging with the territory, we will initiate a sensitive dialogue about the life we live and desire: What poetics and relationships are awakened by an open-air green space? Can the peripheral and desolate spaces of the city reanimate us to the urgency of communal life? Are the daily flows dictating our rhythm, or is it our rhythm that dictates the daily flows? With this challenge, we generate a joint opportunity to look at and listen to the public space, placing it in perspective with projects developed and implemented by Teatro do Frio over the past five years, activating speculative perspectives both in terms of the city we desire and other performative formats capable of responding to that desire.
ACTIVATING ARTISTS’ BIOS
Catarina Lacerda
An actress and theatrical composer for the stage. She holds a degree in Theatre Studies from the School of Music and Performing Arts (ESMAE), awarded with the Eng.º Antº Almeida prize, and is a Specialist Professor with recognised professional experience and competence (CTC of ESMAE/IPP), teaching movement and acting at ESMAE. She is co-founder and artistic co-director of Teatro do Frio, from where she researches relationships between acting, writing, and directing. She has conceived and artistically directed various multidisciplinary creations and has been developing the editorial project Toponímia since 2020. In cinema, her collaborations include André G. Mata/O Pátio do Carrasco (2023), João M. Ferreira/Viveiros (2021), Pedro F. Marques/O Lugar Que Ocupas (2016), and António Ferreira/Deus Não Quis (2007).
Rodrigo Malvar
He holds a Master’s in Contemporary Artistic Creation from the University of Aveiro (UA) and completed the Acting course at ESMAE. His work with Jean Philippe Vassal, Kristin Linklater, David Abram, and Grzegorz Bral stands out. He is a performer, sound artist, and artistic co-director of Teatro do Frio, where he has been deepening the concept of sound drama since 2013, exploring the relationship between composition and dramaturgy. He teaches at ESMAE, where he has been researching the body-voice-mind-emotion relationship since 2013. He has developed and systematised participatory, collaborative, and mediation processes and performances in partnership with Culturgest, the Materiais Diversos Festival, and co-directed the AZEVEDO project. In 2020, he began collaborative curation of the Pólo da Pasteleira as part of Cultura em Expansão – CMP.
- 22 and 23 November 2024
Do We Wish to Work in a Network? Partnerships as an Imperative to Face Current Challenges
Activator: Rogério Roque Amaro
Guest: Carlos Videira (Braga Habit) and António Araújo (President of the Enguardas Residents’ Association)
For more information: desejar2025@gmail.com
PREVIOUS WHEELS OF KNOWLEDGE
5 and 6 July 2024
Cultivating Collective Creation Processes
Activating artist: Francis Wilker
Guest: Luís Fernandes (Artistic Director of Theatro Circo and Musician)
Schedule:
- Friday, 5 July: 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm
- Saturday, 6 July: 10:00 am to 1:00 pm + 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Location: gnration
In this first Wheel of Knowledge, we will present and experiment with some devices to stimulate collective creation processes, valuing the singularities, skills, different life paths, and viewpoints of the participants, aiming to compose original artistic creations. This proposal is guided by two complementary flows:
- Bringing forth materials
- Composing with the created materials
In the sessions, some activation vectors for groups will be proposed, such as: touching the space; excavating memories; poetic imagery; improbable dialogues; traversing the landscape. In the composition dimension, procedures such as simultaneity, juxtaposition, and collage will be experimented with as possibilities to create routes, sequences, and pathways in the elaboration of artistic proposals to be shared.
Activating artist bio
Francis Wilker is a scene artist, director, researcher, and curator. He teaches the Theatre degree course and the Postgraduate Program in Arts at the Institute of Culture and Art of the Federal University of Ceará. He holds a Doctorate and Master’s in Arts from the Postgraduate Program in Performing Arts at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of São Paulo (ECA-USP), where he developed research on directing in urban spaces and the concept of landscape-staging. He is one of the founders of the Brasília-based group Teatro do Concreto, with which he directed, among others, Diário do Maldito (2006), Ruas Abertas (2008), Entrepartidas (2010), Festa de Inauguração (2019), in a continued research involving collaborative creation processes and the interest in the relationship between scene, site-specific, and landscape. In the context of his artistic-pedagogical work, he has also developed scenic creation projects with public schools and associations supporting drug addicts in Brasília. As a curator, he has collaborated with the following festivals: Festival Internacional de Teatro de Brasília – Cena Contemporânea (DF); Festival Internacional de Artes Cênicas da Bahia – FIAC-BA (BA), Festival Nordestino de Teatro de Guaramiranga (CE), and MITbr Plataforma de Internacionalização das Artes Cênicas Brasileiras, which is part of the Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo (MITsp). He is the author of the book Encenação no Espaço Urbano (Editora Horizonte, 2018). In 2022, he was invited as an artist-in-residence at Central Elétrica (Porto), with funding from the Iberescena Program, and created the solo Difrúcio, in a research on memories of the body and space. In 2022, he created the performance Walkshop Paris in partnership with Verônica Veloso and Glauber Coradesqui, a performative walk through Paris during a theatre congress.
5 and 6 October 2024
How to Desire Still? Art and Ecological Transition
Activator: Clara Antunes
Guest: Anabela Carvalho (University of Minho)
Schedule:
- 5 October – 10:00 am to 7:00 pm
- 6 October – 10:00 am to 1:00 pm
Location: Ludoteca, Parque da Ponte – Braga
SYNOPSIS:
How to still desire in a world oversaturated with collapsing ecologies?
Today, we live the desire for progress of our modernist ancestors – the desire of those who came before us. A Cartesian understanding of the world has been hypernormalised, whereby culture holds absolute agency over nature, and humanity reigns, convinced that making more of the world available, reachable, and accessible constitutes the good life.
The climate and ecological crisis, however, present a concrete dissonance to this anthropocentric conception: we are not free from our material circumstances. The imbalances imposed on the Earth’s Planetary System loom as a “hyperobject” (Morton 2013) and anticipate collapse – a new end preceding other becomings. What inhibits us, psychologically and culturally, from confronting the multidimensional crises that the climate emergency brings to our perception?
Based on the study Prospecting Otherwise: stirring culture’s role in tackling the climate emergency, I ask: can artistic experience generate other modes of knowledge and meaning-making in the face of collapse? What role does it play in a radical paradigm shift that allows us to envisage another future, designing new orientations and alternative “ecocentric” ethics?
The philosopher Báyò Akómoláfé recently said: “Ethics is the world in its erotic becoming, the world searching, gasping, orgasmic, constantly becoming itself in an open way; it is how things materialise in a processual universe in flux.” It is imperative to seek other ethics of relationship with the world, which embrace interdependence and the impermanence of things, creating space for the emergence of new reciprocal relationships – ecological modes of operation.
I propose to experiment with you, over two days (which, in a non-linear understanding of time, may even constitute a lifetime), other ecological and aesthetic practices of relation and sensitive or perhaps sensorial apprehension. This exploratory formation will unfold in four movements:
- Tuning in: contemplative practices/creating a climate of attention
- Staying with: foundational concepts and discussion
- Sensing-thinking: practices of meaning incorporation
- Envisioning another future: thinking and operating collectively
We will move, uncertainly, through mud, up steep and dangerous paths – assuming the possibility of falling, or error, as a generative and political act – but we will also let the body slide into warm, crystalline lagoons, surrendering to the pleasure of simply being present. We do not foresee what we desire. However, we know that bringing desire forth – a condition for the constitution of worlds – involves leaving behind an affirmative idea of destiny and instead welcoming, together, the unexpected.
ACTIVATOR:
Clara Mealha Antunes (b. Lisbon, 1988)
Cultural manager, graduated in Architecture (FA-UTL), with a post-graduate degree in Cultural Programming and Management (Universidade Lusófona) and a Master’s in Cultural Studies (FCH-UCP), whose area of interest and research addresses the role of culture and artistic experience in changing cultural paradigms in the face of the ecological and climate crisis. Since 2010, she has been working in production, assisting with artistic programming with communities, communication, and managing cultural projects with various structures and independent artists, including: Vo’Arte; Jonas&Lander; Materiais Diversos; Madalena Victorino and Giacomo Scalisi (Festival TODOS, Lavrar o Mar, etc.); Rua das Gaivotas 6/Teatro Praga; Ponte 9 Plataforma Criativa/Open House Macau; Formiga Atómica, among others. Since 2021, she has been managing the European project “Stronger Peripheries: A Southern Coalition” at Artemrede. She co-created, together with choreographer Ricardo Machado, the performative lecture on climate change Take a Stand (2019-).