Series of Performative Propositions

From newest to oldest, scroll down to see the Performative Proposition Series developed by AND Lab until today.

Series of 'Ten Positions in Face of the Irreparable'

"Five performers, ten performative actions and the proposition to traverse together the worldwide critical moment of uncertainty and suspension instaurated by the covid-19 pandemic, activating the sense-thinking of the living-together modes proposed by MO_AND's ethics of repair and reparation."

"Ten Positions in Face of the Irreparable" is an online series of performances-to-the-camera that combines the languages of live performance and video, conceived by Fernanda Eugenio in collaboration with members of the AND Collective Pat Bergantin, Mariana Pimentel, Milene Duenha, and Guto Macedo, based on the words that make up Fernanda Eugenio's Ten Positions in Face of the Irreparable.

(An)c(h)ourage, co(m)passionment, consistency, comparence, firmness, frankness, sufficiency, justness, dis-illusion, de-scission are the concept-tools translated into gesture, articulating the saying and the moving, in an encounter between bodies of people, words and oranges. The performative program that guides the series consists in the enunciation of the concept of each word accompanied by an action that embodies it, in the encounter-confrontation between human skins and those of the fruit.

While each 'entry' revives itself in a loud reading by Fernanda Eugenio, her body-speech dismembers and re-members itself, through ephemeral compositions that emerge from the montage, in the video, with parts of other bodies in action: body-gestures that materialize in act the (po)ethical-political operations put into play by the concepts. Thus, the screen becomes a common plane, in which the force that each word-position carries does not stop circulating - and "decomporting" itself - in a multiplied and moving embodiment.

Created in a remote collaboration, in work-from-home conditions, during the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic, the videos activate simple resources that were already at hand in isolated situations: telephone cameras and elements found in the domestic environment. Among them, as a way to shape a common plan, the group ended up choosing oranges as an aggregating shared materiality - because they are available in every kitchen and carry a living flesh-filled and a shell-skinned body, sensing operations related to the handled and felt research of the Irreparable.

The episodes of the video performance series are dedicated to the embodied reading of one of the ten words-positions, and can be watched separately or as a whole game-path, ranging from the first to the tenth word, in a journey of body constitution to "repair (in) the Irreparable".

The series was awarded the Art as Breath 2020 prize, from Itaú Cultural, and premiered in July of the same year, as part of the Unruly Studies of the pilot edition of the School of Reparar, opening a collective space for the unfolding of the experience and critical reflection around the (ir)reparability of the world as we know it - a problematic that has guided the work of MO_AND, and has revealed increasingly in the pandemic context.

PsychoSOMAgic Actions series

It consists of a set of performative programs to work on the sensibility through a magical-ritual formulation that activates dis-solution operations: (dis)integration, trans-formation, (trans)bordering, co-temporaneity and (re)landing.

Seeking to approach the Soma as an entity beyond the physical body, involving trans and infra-personal, more-than-human dimensions - individual and ancestral, social and cultural, historical and cosmological - the Actions propose durational and intensive experiences, quasi-journeys, that aim at the intimate-personal matter (in the form of discomfort and disquiet and/or challenging emotions such as fear, anger, shame, and guilt) in order to cross and transmute it into a symbolic-performative plane.

The Actions, created by Fernanda Eugenio and Dani d'Emilia in the scope of their collaborative research Dis-solution Practices, emerged during the 2020 edition of the stANDing program of the School of Reparar, with the support of the Lisbon City Council, when the Dis-solution Practices came into conversation with the Ten Positions in the face of the Irreparable, by Fernanda Eugenio, which worked as the theme for the activities of that year.

This series was synthesized in five unpublished videos, edited by Pedro Henrique Risse, each of them dedicated to the collision between two of Fernanda Eugenio's concept-words-positions/tools: (an)c(h)ourage & co(m)passionment, consistency & compearance, firmness & frankness, sufficiency & justness, dis-illusion & de-scission (link above within Portuguese text).

Metalogue Series

In this Series, begun in 2015, Fernanda Eugenio and Ana Dinger collect situated performance-conversations, experimenting with different degrees of audience’s participation.

As any usual conversation, metalogues are unrepeatable and ungovernable. They bear the risk of the encounter because their paths, means and tones emerge in their own doing. Unlike usual conversations, metalogues recover an operation proposed by Gregory Bateson: the commitment to make the conversation materialise what is being talked about.

In the metalogue, the attempt is to perform with concepts or, if possible, to perform the concepts, performing intensive modes of thinking-in-relation.The effort is of presentation and not of representation, in the sense of overcoming, through use, tensions such as structure vs. matter and form vs. content.

The question-problem to be handled is usually suggested by a host event. The work is, above all, to prepare the conditions for the encounter and that preparatory work (often also already metalogic) consists of mapping the neighbourhoods of the problem and proposing tools, materials, formats or interfaces to be used. The metalogue inhabits different territories, each time resulting in a singular object. It is a programme that recurs without relapsing, which is another way of saying that the procedure is repeated, though its materialisation differs.

By rehearsing a perspectivist operative mode, the metalogue traverses the landscape of the problem using the tactic of the gift: the problem gains a body through receiving and reciprocating each position-taking. The metalogue is continued until the inaugural question is reformulated, by extension, into one or more questions. Metalogues result in objects as varied as a slideshow battle, a live-written article, a lecture without speech, a game of cards or an invitation-mechanism proposing a set of tasks to be performed in a square.

Metalogues are created according to a logic often attributed to happenings: to be presented only once, in the situation that originally triggers and welcomes them. The emergent materiality of some of the metalogues has, however, led to the possibilities of re-enactment and/or autonomization of the artefacts resulting from some editions (when the potential for unfolding becomes evident and the work calls for continuation).

Past editions:

Metalogue # 1 - the modes of the situation (Performance, Art and Politics, Athens, September 2015);

Metalogue #2 - the artist-ethnographer & the ethnographer-artist (Mind the Gap, Universidade Católica, Lisbon, November 2015);

Metalogue #3 - the modes of surface (À procura da superfície, ESE, Porto, April 2016);

Metalogue #4 - stories & geographies of performance (Performance Art em Portugal, CCB Museu Berardo, Lisbon, July 2016)

Metalogue #5 - the modes of the public (Festival Amostra Urbana, Curitiba, November 2017)

Metalogue # 6 – the Irreparable, between past and future (Exposições-Ocupação AND; Mira Artes Performativas, Porto, and Rua das Gaivotas 6, Lisboa,  December 2019)

Metalogue # 7 – the scar (Dez anos em Posição-Com, Penhasco, Lisbon, October 2021)

AND How Series

It began in 2015, created by Fernanda Eugenio and Francisco Gaspar Neto. AND How is a situation-proposition that, by installing a temporary conviviality among strangers (the audience), invites participants to engage in a collective investigation concerning various dimensions of life and its operations, synthesized, at each edition, in one word-question.

Each time, the situation begins in-between-2 (Fernanda Eugenio or Francisco Gaspar are either the hosts or guests, inviting or being invited by someone else) and is activated as plan of encounter, extending the invitation for the in-between-many – an in-between nourished by whoever shares the same concern and wishes to contribute with further questions and materials.

Each edition of AND How is installed in a different environment and is initiated with a collection of materials curated by the proponents of each edition.

This initial collection/curatorship can shrink or stretch and will constitute the territory-question to be inhabited collectively, even if provisionally, allowing for the investigation of ways to rearrange the materials and find new paths.

Past editions:

AND HOW #1 the modes of conversation; situation: dinner among strangers | with Fernanda Eugenio and artist and AND Lab collaborator Francisco Gaspar Neto (Lisbon, 2015)

AND HOW #2 the modes of solitude; situation: weekend dedicated to an auto-ethnography of intimacy, mediated by a set of tasks and audio recordings | with Fernanda Eugenio and artist and AND Lab collaborator Francisco Gaspar Neto (Lisbon, 2015)

AND HOW #3 the modes of pause; situation: the experience of a Japanese tea ceremony | with Fernanda Eugenio and Japanese-Brazilian artist Erika Kobayashi (Lisbon, 2015)

AND HOW #4 the modes of the word; situation: experimenting and using AND’s concept-tools and further poetic games | with Fernanda Eugenio and poet Gab Marcondes (Lisbon, 2015)

AND HOW #5 the modes of tuning; situation: experimenting and using the procedures of visual artist Lygia Clark | with Fernanda Eugenio and psychologist Catarina Resende (Lisbon, 2016)

AND HOW #6 the modes of frequency; situation: in relation with different ways of inhabiting an occupied building | with Francisco Gaspar Neto and artist and AND Lab collaborator Milene Duenha (Curitiba, 2018)

'Secalharidade' ('Mayhapness') Series

Secalharidade was originally a conference-performance created in collaboration between Fernanda Eugenio and João Fiadeiro, produced by RE.AL and co-produced by Culturgest and Festival Alkantara, premiered in 2012.

The central material generated by the piece was a 2-meter long banner-manifesto, written live by Fernanda while João slowly rotated the paper around a pole belonging to the architecture of Culturgest's Small Auditorium. The pole, usually avoided or camouflaged in the works mounted there, in this case was turned into a key element, around which the proposition emerged.

In the two subsequent years, the banner-manifesto became autonomous from its initial context and was first turned into a limited edition silkscreen created by the Ghost label (2013) and then into site-specific actions in which the banner was taken to the street on two very different occasions.

The first was the demonstration "Screw the Troika, we want our lives" (Lisbon, 2013), the largest demonstration against the Troika's austerity measures then in force in Portugal. The second took place during Serralves em Festa (Porto, 2014), a large-scale event in which the museum's doors stay open for 48 hours and receive the largest public turnout of the year. In the first case, the banner camouflaged itself in the midst of other banners with claiming writings, at the same time adapting to the context and deviating from it, by the slightly out of place, philosophical-poetic, tone of the words. In the second case, it purposely inserted itself as a strange displaced object in the midst of a situation where works of art were expected to be seen, an expectation that the banner both confirmed and contradicted, with its precarious and 'badly finished' materiality.

After many years in storage, the object returned to Serralves in 2021, as part of the exhibition "Para uma timeline a haver - história da dança em Portugal", by Ana Bigotte Vieira, Carlos Oliveira and João dos Santos Martins.

Original text of the play Secalharidade, presented in June 2012 in the small auditorium of Culturgest:

We are here to take a position and to share it in co-positioning, in "encounter mode". It is from the explicit and re-situated matter of this reciprocal presence that we aim to extract a way to resist. To re-exist. A way around the hostage state in which the logic of representation holds us. A way to betray it, just enough to return the encounter to the plane of use. Not to deny it, nor to affirm it - since the No and Yes machines would only reinforce it, but to do with it. To go backward instead of forward, stanching the modern kinetics of knowing, proliferated and aggravated, today more than ever, in the collectivist addiction to "this is it" and the postmodern loop of "this is it or this, or still this..." Entertainment that immunizes us in an ad nauseum waste of answers that meanwhile forgets to question the question.

Minimum condition: not to miss the event and, above all, to arrive on time. Disarmed of previous answers, available to catch in the Obvious the emergence of another question. Deactivate expectation and all its doubles - desires for control and manipulation - which, as a rule, make us arrive early to the "knowing" (saber) and late to the "flavouring" (sabor) of the encounter. To activate, in its place, a state of mayhapness, an expectation distracted from all the parti pris, which grows as we engage in a reciprocal estimation, an openness to the "accident" of the Other. It also activates a filigree responsibility, an ethic of attentive handling, instead of apathy, of non-comparison, of a generalized fleeing, of disillusioned giving up.

We are here, then, proposing an in-betweenness. A "having with," a reciprocal sustaining of not knowing. A "letting oneself be" long enough for the interval itself to become "and", in relation, in mutual alteration and world widening. An in-between that grows and propagates itself as a way. Not as a mid-term, but as a condition.

The Game of Questions

This conference-demonstration was created in the same period, in 2013, to function as a mediation tool, allowing to introduce Modus Operandi AND to the public in an expository format. Combining oral, performative, audiovisual, and graphic elements, the situation instaurated by this proposition was able to touch the main tools and questions of the AND Lab project in a little less than an hour.

Within the conference, a mockup version of the pole used in the piece Mayhapness, as well as the re-enactment of the writing of the banner-manifesto, served as aggregators, around which the presentation was structured.

The conference-demonstration O Jogo das Perguntas was presented several times throughout 2013, in Portugal (Atelier RE.AL, Lisbon; Centro Cultural de Cascais, Cascais; Museu de Serralves, Porto), in Brazil (Festival Múltipla Dança, Florianópolis; Faculdade de Artes do Paraná, Curitiba), in Argentina (IUNA, Buenos Aires) and Chile (Universidad de Santiago).

Excerpt from the original synopsis:

The game of questions begins when we are caught by the unpredictable. It begins, then, neither by the beginning nor by the end, but by the middle: that place-situation in which the accident breaks in and interrupts us, giving us the opportunity to find another game, in which the rules can emerge from the play itself.

The activation of this other modus operandi happens in the passage from "knowing why" to "tasting what," allowing the event itself to tell us what it tastes like. In this game, it is no longer the surrounding situation that occupies the place of what is expected, but we ourselves enter in "waiting mode".

The first and maybe the only gesture is really this: to stop. Or, better saying, "re-stop": to stop again in order to repair. As soon as we "re-stop", the middle becomes relevant: we are what we have and whatever there is within ourselves. This reciprocal implication makes us, along with the accident, simultaneously space, time, matter, and relation. If we can sustain this just medium, if we can bear not knowing, it will be the sustainability of the encounter itself that will then have space to (un)fold itself into coexistence and common plan.

Words-Lecture Series

Is it possible to enter into a relation-betrayal with/of language, at the same time doing things with it and outside of it, and turning this operation into a means to divert language’s vocation for order and endorsement? Is it possible to make words and wording the work of doing, circumscribing without ever writing?

Since 2006, Fernanda Eugenio has explored different procedures of intervening in the materiality of words - of poetic and sculptural re-materialisation of words - as modes of conceptual invention and search for consistency between thinking and doing, speech and practice.

This work of wording – the labour of words – is relentless and relates, perhaps, to the nonconformity coming from the weariness words sometimes experience. It is certainly related to accepting that ‘one has to do with what one has’ - even if what one has is only weary words. It is also related to the broadening of what translation can be, claiming a research territory for intra-language translation, in addition to the accostumed inter-language translation.

For more than ten years, countless words were the subject of this labour, having resulted in performative objects using the most diverse interfaces: poetry, urban stencils and stamps; video and photography; drawing; sculpture with improvised materials such as ice, homemade pasta, objects of daily use, etc. Some of the explored words were: almost, error, attention, delay, courage, distance, no, so, soon, outside. From the Words-Lecture Series emerged all the word games (tension relations, triangulations, transformations and neologisms) that currently constitute the concept-tools of Modus Operandi AND.

Re-programme Series

This Series brings together a set of propositions that are responsive to place, in the form of invisible and/or durational performances, imagery drifting-collections and participatory performance-games, creations of Fernanda Eugenio, using the procedures developed in her long-term research Ethnography as Situated Performance.

These works, despite diverse, have in common the affection for the living and mutant texture of the body-city-landscape aggregate; the recurring use of storytelling (writing and photographic image) as way of archiving experience; and, above all, they share the same creation protocol, using the dispositifs of Reparagem and Re-programme.

What also unites these works is a way of creating whose execution produces, at the same time as it makes visible (with varying degrees of visibility), a work-operation that, once programmed - that is, organised as territory for something to happen or not happen - allows to work recursively with its consequences, in a potentially limitless series.

From the installation of a common zone of attention in the territory of the city, one works with different fractal cuts of urban matter, following the path: wandering and stopping > description and maximization > circumscription and minorization> proposition of the programme > execution and collection of consequences> re-proposition of the programme.

It is a procedure that shifts ethnographic sensitivity and performativity into a common and collective plane of use, approaching them as instruments for the everyday game of relational co(m)position and live performance of the encounter.