Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema 2022

The Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema is an advanced course in arts and cinema, combining critical thinking with film and contemporary art. The diversity of research and creative approaches, as well as the main challenges of our shared historical present, will be discussed by a group of artists and filmmakers together with thinkers, scholars and activists. The Summer School is accepting applications for participants and for workshops. 

Brazil—cross dynamics of otherness
Following Zalamea’s reflections on South America, the notion of weaving—interlacing—and pendular movements—back-and-forth—become key instruments to navigate the complexities brought into being by Brazilian cultures over the past few years. Both internally and externally, its outcomes seem to thrive on bipolar trajectories. Magic and science, become magic-as-science and science-as-magic; local and universal, become local-universe and universal-locale. Such manoeuvres are easily observable in the ever-expanding scale of a single condo in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius, or in the sinusoidal epistemological games in Ana Vaz’s Apiyemiyekî?. All confirmations of Brazil as a pivotal platform in producing, holding, building upon, and cherishing the results of such pendular movements. This pendular movements also suggested Portuguese artists to immerse in the political and historical convulsions of Brazil’s geography. In this sense, both Susana de Sousa Dias investigation on Fordlândia and João Salaviza / Renée Nader Messora living project in the Krahô community testify the need to understand other alterities and to negotiate very different world views.   

At this year’s Porto Summer School, participants will be immersed in these discussions, participating in daily workshops with these artists, who will be in Porto during the first week of July 2022. Between artistic practices, creative atmospheres, and a historical and contemporary dive into the epistemologies of the South.  

Invited artists and scholars: Ana Vaz, João Salaviza & Renée Nader Messora, Kaê Guajajara, Kleber Mendonça Filho, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Susana de Sousa Dias. More to be announced. 

The Summer School will be organized in partnership with Kebraku, a cultural association based in Portugal that fosters the diversity of Brazilian culture. More informations and applications here. 

Call for workshops
Following the main guidelines for this year’s Summer School, we invite artists, scholars and collectives to submit a proposal for a three hours workshop (deadline: May 15) to take place during the mornings of the School. These workshops can take different forms: more performative or more theoretical, addressing the pressing issues presented in the curatorial text.  

Submitted proposals should reflect the Summer School’s main theme tracing a vast array of lines of inquiry. Among others, proposals could be articulated to explore either through research or artistic practice topics like: 
–Brazilian Epistemological Entanglements 
–The Possibility of a Southern Modernism 
–Indigenous Futurisms and Science-Fictions 
–Aural Visual Travels on Brazilian Cultures 
–Cross-cultural relations between Portugal and Brazil 
–Questions of Political Awareness on Class, Race and Gender 
–Artistic and Animism Practices 
–Indigenous Cultures and Imaginaries 

We strongly suggest the articulation of the above topics with artistic practices. More information and applications here. For further information please contact: summerschool.arts [at] porto.ucp.pt and artes [at] porto.ucp.pt. 

The School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto 
The School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa is based in Porto and offers graduate and undergraduate courses in Film, Music, Sound, Photography, New Media, Heritage and Conservation. The selected candidate should be able to articulate/integrate the aforementioned research areas in the work to be developed during the residency. The School of Arts facilities include sound recording studios and equipment, editing rooms and filming equipment, a MoCap room, a Chroma Key studio, a fabrication lab, besides painting and sculpture studios. 

The SoA is currently accepting applications for their master programs and international applications to SoA’s undergraduate programs.  Applications for SoA’s PhD programs will open on May 1. You can check SoA’s full offer of courses here (in Portuguese).