School of Reparar

AND Lab's Ongoing Artistic-Political Training Program

Positioning itself within a paradoxical and urgent task, between the irreparability of the world-as-it-is and the ethical commitment to its reparation,  the School of Reparar,  AND Lab's ongoing artistic-political training program, proposes to combine the Modus Operandi AND with other embodied artistic-political propositions, collaborative composition tools and somatic practices, in a transdisciplinary and undisciplined program, dedicated to the articulation body-community and to the re-knowledge and re(e)nunciation of tactics for the (un)learning of the rooted and unequally distributed violence within each one of us.

The proposal takes shape from a solid artistic research work on the politics of coexistence, which has been accumulating experience and weaving networks for two decades, between Portugal and Brazil, through a consistent periodic program of workshops, summer schools, laboratories and residencies. Installing itself as a transversal platform in the living field of political-affective struggles that we have been inhabiting, the School of Reparar is based on the in-betweenness, as a perennial instance of experimentation and reimagination of what we want and can as communities. It becomes, thus, a gesture of support for the dream and of a possible performance of a territory of common firmness, seeking to contemplate the amplitude of the AND network and to constitute collectivity through the geographical, durational, and sensitive connection-displacement, collecting forces, knowledge, and affections on both sides of the ocean to deal with the ethical issue of reparation.

The School of Reparar emerges from the desire to contribute to a process that is triggered by the acknowledgement that it is no longer possible to reiterate an unsustainable world, supported by predatory-extractivist logics. By proposing a multi-localized, transversal and based-on-practical-knowledge school, the School of Reparar aims to connect realities and bodies diversely affected by the Irreparable. We intend to create an interspace dedicated to collectivizing the act of research-creation, making it coincident with the act of living-inhabiting and relating-performing. We intend to create a space for the in-between - to reciprocally sustain one another into community - so we can exercise ways of being intimate without being near, and nurture together possibilities of remaking sensibilities and worlds.

The program has annual thematic editions and takes place in different locations away from urban centers and in the city, between Portugal and Brazil, supported also by a digital platform of community-collection, virtual sharing rooms and online actions, composing itself as a collective landscape, at the same time immersive and expanded.Conjugating both the intensive retreat mode - displaced from the city to countryside and focused on (re)activating an attentive relationship with the Earth-Soma through the sensitive experience of the human and non-human inseparability - and the extensive mode - focused on how to infiltrate and sustain a communitarian mode in the urban and digital everyday life, the annual program of the School of Reparar unfolds into five meeting instances - LAND, stANDing, Estudos Indóceis (Unrully Studies), hANDling & LANDscape -  which are presented here and make up the structure of the School, distributed in a unique way in each edition, crossed by the common issue-theme of the year.

hANDling | stANDing | Unruly Studies | LANDscape

Modulations of the School of Reparar

The nomenclatures School of Reparar, hANDling, understANDing and LANDscape were created within the scope of the investigation in the MO_AND process and, due to their transversal importance, they recur, having already been used in previous programs of the AND Lab.

The concept-tool hANDling refers to the exercise of attentive handling and surrender to the Event, while understANDing names the possibility of consistent compearence, which does not require understanding or identification to get involved. LANDscape, in turn, refers to the "in-between" of the common plane, which constitutes everyone involved in it, at the same time as it is constituted by them. It also points to the movement of re-membering and de-scission with the Earth proposed by MO_AND.

Continued attendance circuit of MO_AND and other embodied tools, in which introductory and unfolding workshops and regular sessions for embodiment in/of the practice are offered throughout the year, as well as the possibility of one-off sessions by appointment.

Immersive research-creation focused on digesting, re-membering and creating public propositions of new practices, tools, artefacts and creations generated along the process.

Study Group dedicated to a first approach to the annual issue-theme, through practiced research and reciprocal listening.

Durational landscape-program, which unfolds the annual issue-theme and takes the form of a single practical and reflective path/course bringing together in its 'rugged relief' different relational interfaces each year, exploring intensive and extensive, immersive and regular formats, face-to-face and online, urban and rural, and calling on other practices and tools in conversation with MO_AND.