4 - Artistic Practices: Imagination, Materialities and Transitions

GENERAL OBJECTIVES

Group 4 promotes interdisciplinary approaches to artistic practice, understanding it in its aesthetic and cultural dimensions, in its different temporalities and in its socio-political and historical contexts of production. Recognising that art is inherently interdisciplinary and requires plural forms of research, Group 4 provides for different epistemological approaches to artistic production:

a) As a sensitive object, it is concerned with its processes of subjectivisation, its modes of shaping experience and its conditions of aesthetic and conceptual intelligibility. This approach pays particular attention to the art systems and the heterogeneity that define the discourse, practice and experience of art in contemporary times.

b) As an object of inquiry, it is concerned with how art reflects and influences social, cultural and philosophical dynamics, historically and contemporarily. This approach understands art as an agent in the production of the present, and leads to forms of enquiry about society mediated through artistic and cultural production.

c) As a context for the production of reflection, understanding the different forms of artistic and expressive representation (cinema, music, plastic arts, performing arts, expressive culture) as particular systems of knowledge production, supporting emerging artistic research practices and promoting a reflection on art as a knowledge system.

As a platform for dialogue and convergence, promoting integration into national and international networks, Group 4 welcomes researchers and artists from different institutions at the University of Coimbra, such as the College of Art, the Faculty of Arts or the Gil Vicente Academic Theatre.

MAIN LINES OF RESEARCH

1. Intersection between the political and the social spheres;
2. Production of images / sounds / gestures of alterity and contemporary identity;
3. Material, ideological and aesthetic conditions of artistic production at different moments in history and in the present day;
4. Interdisciplinary nature of creativity and the blurred and intersected boundaries between different arts;
5. Forms of historical mediation and representation of time characterised by different contexts, subjects and artistic objects;
6. Reconfiguration of identity boundaries that constitute the experience of subjects in contemporary times (gender, class, ethnicity, religion, etc.) mediated through artistic expression and the creative subject;
7. Inclusion of the forms of production and mediation of the arts in the ecological imperative and the multimodal challenges of environmental and social sustainability;
8. Inclusion of forms of artistic production in the movements of civic participation and social activism that mark the contemporary dynamics of political participation;
9. Articulation between art systems and the sensitive structures that are a tribute to different historical periods.