![The Modus Operandi AND [MO_AND]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9fff47_87bb9cab98584b7da2cccdfefadea395~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_815,h_545,q_90/9fff47_87bb9cab98584b7da2cccdfefadea395~mv2.webp)
History & Trajectory
History
Founded in 2011 in Lisbon and constituted as a non-profit cultural association in 2015, AND Lab is an artisanal artistic research structure, which has been developing a unique, experimental and expanded approach to artistic creation, practicing it as a durational, transversal and interdisciplinary micropolitical action, combining ways of doing (know-how's?) and interfaces from different artistic fields (performance, dance, theater, visual arts, site-specific practices etc.) and in areas such as anthropology, education and radical pedagogies, clinical psychology of territory, sustainable architecture and agriculture, activism and community mediation etc.
This approach has become a singular mark over the years during which AND Lab has sustained a consistent and regular programming, always based on the permeability between research, transmission, and creation, as well as on the construction of an immersive-participatory, relational and performative devices that, at the same time, provide the fruition of the encounter and allow to take the coexistence as a space for research and collective co-creation.
The AND Lab’s programming is based on the transmission-sharing of the tools of the Modus Operandi AND (collaborative composition and care-curation methodology created by Fernanda Eugenio) in conversation with related practices and with the proposition of different motor issues every year. AND Lab has been based at Penhasco Cooperative for two years, after an itinerant period in which it was hosted by several structures in Lisbon. AND Lab has consolidated a network within Europe and South American, and set up a regular program in Lisbon - whose flagship, the continued and expanded artistic-political training program Escola do Reparar, is anchored in a previous program of summer schools and laboratories that included 5 editions in Lisbon and 8 Brazilian editions, held in the cities of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Curitiba.
Escola do Reparar takes shape in 2020 with a premiering edition and becomes a regular program in 2021 together with the commemoration of ten years of existence of the AND Lab platform in Lisbon. Over the years AND Lab has built a solid artistic research work on the politics of coexistence, which has been accumulating experience and weaving networks for almost two decades, between Portugal and Brazil.
Set as a perennial and transversal platform, in the living field of political-affective struggles that we have been going through, the AND Lab is based on the "in-between", as an instance of experimentation and re-imagination of what we want and can do as communities.
Trajectory
The AND Lab and the Modus Operandi AND, as structured today, emerged as a consequence of Fernanda Eugenio's extensive research since the beginning of the 2000s, marked by intensive collaborations, displacements and deviations, between strict academic research and a singular and increasingly undisciplined investigation of the artistic and political uses of ethnography as a circumscriptive-performative tool.
This on-going research has been synthesized in different ways and with different names throughout the years - System IS-OR-AND, AND Way of Life, Reciprocal Ethnography, Ethnography as Situated Performance, Reprogramme, Reparagem, Pensacção – until it stabilized in the current terminology Modus Operandi AND, which emerged during the collaboration with the Portuguese choreographer João Fiadeiro.
The first formulation of Modus Operandi AND dates back from 2002 and the period (2002-2006) Fernanda Eugenio was working on her doctorate in Anthropology, at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The proximity with the field of performative arts that followed and, also, the continuous confirmation of AND as a set of tools with transversal use have led to the emergence of a vast network of collaborators and interlocutors. Without prejudice to the relationship with artistic practices (visual and performative) and performance studies, other possibilities gained ground, such as intersections with care practices and mediation in psychology (in particular transdisciplinary and territory clinic), pedagogy, social service and education service in museums and cultural centres, as well as activism, architecture and tactical urbanism. There have been other prolific conversations and applications of the Modus Operandi AND in areas as diverse as computing, agriculture, food or neurosciences.
The long-term collaboration between Fernanda Eugenio and João Fiadeiro began in 2009, initially materialized through occasional initiatives between Brazil and Portugal and later formalized as a project produced by RE.AL, with the support of DGArtes (2011-2014). Between 2011 and 2012, AND Lab was mainly a research project: simultaneously a postdoctoral project in Anthropology carried out by Fernanda Eugenio at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon and an initiative in collaboration with RE.AL. At that time, João Fiadeiro had suspended his work as an author, hosting this laboratory of reciprocal ethnography proposed by Fernanda Eugenio, where the ethical approach of AND was placed in systematic conversation with Real Time Composition (RTC), a method developed by the choreographer since the 90s.
The lecture-performances Secalharidade (2012) and The Game of Questions (2013) belong to this period and sought to synthesize the inhabited philosophy of Modus Operandi AND. Those years were of intensive experimentation, during which the prevailing conviction was that both tools – MO_AND and RTC - could together form a single set of practices. In March 2013, still in this framework, Fernanda Eugenio and João Fiadeiro founded AND Lab as a research centre: no longer just a project, AND Lab was now a place. It was based at Atelier Real, in Lisbon – also the seat of João Fiadeiro´s company RE.AL.
During 2013 and especially in 2014, the intensive use and interlocutions that have been gathered around the two practices helped clarify important differences in terms of modulation, focus, and application between them. MO_AND has been confirming its inclination as a pronouncedly political and transversal tool of care-curation, whereas RTC has been rediscovering its place and importance as a choreographic composition tool and methodology of creation. Maintaining the recognition of the richness the period of coexistence brought up to each research, the two practices followed their own paths separately from 2014 onwards. A couple of procedures are yet shared nowadays, including the basic board game, although MO_AND and RTC each give them a distinct use. Also part of the current vocabulary practiced by João Fiadeiro in RTC is still fed by the AND philosophy.
Modus Operandi AND has consolidated as an ethic and way of life committed to the application of reciprocity that sustains life (in) common at the level of micropolitics, encompassing a set of tools for collective use. It is open to any type of body, matter or issues. It has become the elemental methodology for a transversal and continuous artistic-political training project, in the intersection between arts, critical thinking, embodied political-affective practices and radical pedagogies.
Since 2015 and under the Direction of Fernanda Eugenio the AND Lab platform has been set itself within an intertwining between artistic practices, participatory processes, politics and spirituality, inhabiting and deepening practices of healing, social justice and fomenting the (re)activation of inseparability as a sensitive experience of relationship with Earth-Soma. Based in Lisbon, AND Lab has become itinerant and has been hosted by different structures throughout the city, such as Estúdio Vanda Melo, Fórum Dança, Baldio Estudos de Performance collective (seasonal collaboration). Between mid-2015 and mid-2016, it finally took the shape of a cultural association, in which Fernanda Eugenio had the affectionate and attentive support of Ana Dinger in the structural care and day by day research until 2019.
Between 2015 and 2019 the annual and regular programs of the AND Summer Schools and Laboratories emerged. Under the direction and curatorship of Fernanda Eugenio, in conversation with different interlocutors, the axis Portugal-Brazil was set, based on annual thematic editions in Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba and São Paulo. The somatic-political intervention strength of these encounters - and their capacity to make an energetic field, themselves as space-time zones of aggregation, interconnection and transmutation - translated itself into the growing affluence and agglutination of people joining immersions, in increasing numbers and purposes. This movement, little by little, has been indicating the need to build conditions so that this pulsating landscape could establish itself in a continuous, extensive, and durational format. Thus, having these intensive annual meetings as direct ancestors, the current expanded program of the Escola do Reparar emerges in 2020.
Throughout this intensive five-year period of courses and labs, AND Lab carried out most of its activities in the premises of the municipal equipment Polo Cultural das Gaivotas. In December 2019 it moved into the artistic cooperative Penhasco, settling the Lisbon atelier. In parallel, five local AND Lab hubs were opened in Brazil - in Curitiba (since November 2017, run by Francisco Gaspar Neto and Milene Duenha), in Rio de Janeiro (since January 2018, run by Guto Macedo, Iacã Macerata and Mariana Pimentel), in São Paulo (since August 2018, run by Naiá Delion and Pat Bergantin), in Brasilia (since April 2019, run by Alina Duchrow, Guilherme Mayer, Luana Castro, Jaqueline Silva and Rosa Schramm) and in Palmas, Tocantins (since March 2022, run by Thaise Nardim), and two local hubs in Europe, one in Spain, in Madrid (since June 2018, run by Samuel Sardinha) and one in Germany, in Berlin (since May 2022, run by Manoela Rangel).
The already transversal network of AND Lab and Modus Operandi AND partners has, in recent years, materialized into an increasingly varied projects and initiatives, in a journey that has also spread geographically - among Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, Vietnam, and the Philippines
Singular collaborative projects of visceral importance to MO_AND have also been established during this time, such as:
the resumption from 2014 of the collaboration in site-specific practices between Fernanda Eugenio and Gustavo Ciríaco (2009-present);
the interlocution between Fernanda Eugenio and Soraya Jorge’s Authentic Movement, counting also on the exchange and partnership with Guto Macedo and Naiá Delion, in a continued research of procedures for sensitive listening and (co)response-ability, through the approach between Repairing and Witnessing (2015-present);
the collaborative season between Fernanda Eugenio and Francisco Gaspar Neto around the AND How (2015)
the emergence of Metálogos, between Fernanda Eugenio and Ana Dinger, which became a series and had six editions (2015-2019);
entering into direct conversation with clinical and transdisciplinary psychology, with Fernanda Eugenio, Iacã Macerata and Ruan Rocha as the most frequent interlocutors in a direct relationship, in addition to contributions from Eduardo Passos, Catarina Resende, Mariana Borges, Letícia Barbosa, and Christian Sade, in Brazil, and Mariana Ferreira, in Portugal (2017-present);
the initial research around what would become the ANDbodiment procedure, with Fernanda Eugenio, Milene Duenha and Flora Mariah, and with Joana Maia and Ruan Rocha as guest corps (2017-2018)
the encounter between MO_AND and Ternura Radical, which gave birth to both Dis-Immunisation and Dis-solution Practices, created between Fernanda Eugenio and Dani d'Emilia (2018-2020) and, more recently, the incipient Re-fusing Practices, when the collaboration of Sarah Amsler is added to the two, opening a plane of more direct partnership with the Gestures Towards Decolonial Futures Collective (2021).
the emergence out of the body-territory games (ANDbodiment and Compearance) of MO_AND, based on the focus on etheric manifestations and the movement of forces that start to become frequent in this plane, leading to an en/ex-corporation research that activates a political spirituality and a spiritualized politics, in a collaborative project between Fernanda Eugenio, Pat Bergantin and Manoela Rangel, the Re-mediation Practices (2020-present)
As of 2020, an important reorientation in the AND Lab project is beginning to take shape, towards a closer and more direct relation and cohabitation with the earth. This inclination, which has been a desire over the years, based on the communitarian way of life that emerged around MO_AND, was confirmed as even more imperative and opportune with the emergence of the covid-19 pandemic, leading to different experimentations with host structures in the countryside, both in Brazil and Portugal, with the realization of some residencies, experimentally called LAND, in Bahia and the Algarve, until the emergence of the partnership with the Trust Collective, in Barril de Alva, Coimbra region, through which the Escola do Reparar makes a first more consistent movement to transfer its actions to the field.
The pandemic situation also triggers, between 2020 and 2021, a reconfiguration of the collaborative bonds within AND Lab, including the Lisbon base and the clusters throughout Brazil. With the shift onto the online interface (work-from-home settings), AND Lab’s actions have no longer been set individually with each cluster alone. Instead they have been concentrated on a single and online plane, leading to the integration of the most frequent and recent collaborators into a single large group, giving birth to a field of support and care for the project from different geographic locations, planning and proposing together actions that have become part of the Escola do Reparar. Thus, a transoceanic collective emerges as the support body of the AND Lab platform: the AND Collective is composed by Fernanda Eugenio, Flora Mariah, Guto Macedo, Iacã Macerata, Manoela Rangel, Mariana Pimentel, Milene Duenha, Naiá Delion, Pat Bergantin and Ruan Rocha.
![The Modus Operandi AND [MO_AND]](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9fff47_87bb9cab98584b7da2cccdfefadea395~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_815,h_530,q_90/9fff47_87bb9cab98584b7da2cccdfefadea395~mv2.webp)
