Multiversidade | Pós-Produção

Retrospecting and concluding the practice-based research that has been occupying Rogério Nuno Costa since 2015, within para-academic projects that co-exist at the intersections between art, science, philosophy and pop culture, MULTIVERSITY proposes the problematization of a speculative and post-fictional discourse that ambitions the reconfiguration of the modern University, perhaps also the prediction of its future, through the (queer) exercise of failure and fault, performed as a dispositif of resistance to hegemonic models of knowledge production and transmission. The anthological intervention prepared for the 10th edition of Circular Festival will include the presentation of the namesake lecture-performance, preceded by an open laboratory under the motto “For the writing of an academy as performance”, both on the premises of the Escola Superior de Media Arts e Design (Instituto Politécnico do Porto), in Vila do Conde. It was in that same building that a first theoretical-practical elaboration of MULTVERSITY, still as a prototype, would have been tested, at the time in the form of a multidisciplinary programme entitled “The Curator's School” (Circular Festival, 2008), led collaboratively by Rogério Nuno Costa and artists-researchers. After many proto-laboratorial experiences, the project would officially start in 2015, multiplying in a series of performances in situ, working groups and experimental laboratories installed temporarily within academic institutions, research centres and independent educational programmes. In 2021, the wealth of information (mostly textual) would eventually be compiled into a retrospective lecture-performance presented as an academic thesis (or its infinite abstract). Elaborating and re-imagining utopian alternatives to the contemporary academy, the performance confronts the über-liberal narrative of excellence, the university of rankings, the statuos quo of post-truth, the massification and the hyper-specialization, with the possibility of a university without "building", dematerialized and undisciplined. Not a university for many, rather a university for multiples. Weaving para-scientific, pseudo-scientific and anti-scientific metaphysical theories, the text fabulates several (radical) pedagogical heterotopias based on the dramatization of a thesis-as-performance and of its impossible defense. An expanded and corrected version of the lecture, rehearsed for the first time at O Espaço do Tempo in June 2024, incorporates now the contributions gathered over the last three years, dicussing the means, modes, methods and operations with which we want to conjure up a meta-school (or a school “without” school) built on shaky ground. This intervention will inaugurate a new and last development for the MULTIVERSITY project (Year 4 – Post-Production), announcing the possibility of a nomadic academy, more or less peripheral, more or less precarious, simultaneously inventorying and experimenting with ex-titutional modes for investigating, imagining, wandering and contemplating. The results will be concluded and compiled in 2025, within the scope of two documental endeavours planned to happen in Porto and Helsinki. 

 

Interventions:

 

(experimental laboratory conducted by Rogério Nuno Costa & guests)

 

25, 26 and 27 Sept. 14:00-19:00

Escola Superior de Media Artes e Design, Room B105

(a lecture-performance by Rogério Nuno Costa)

 

28 Sept. (Sat.), 16:00

Escola Superior de Media Artes e Design, Black Box

 

Rogério Nuno Costa (1978) is a performer, theatre director, writer, researcher, pedagogue and curator, living and working in between Portugal and Finland. His para-artistic and documental work is of a hybrid and cross-disciplinary nature, with a special interest in the creation of pieces that merge art and research (lecture-performances), among other hybrid formats. His projects explore and problematize the fields of performing arts and literature at their intersections with philosophy, art theory and social and communication sciences. He collaborates with several artists as dramaturg/ist and editorial coordinator. Has been teaching in independent art schools and lectured in academic institutions such as Escola Superior de Artes e Design (Caldas da Rainha), ArtEZ University of the Arts (Arnhem) and Universidade do Minho (Guimarães). Collaborator in the Performative Studies Research Group at Centro de Estudos Humanísticos (Universidade do Minho) and in the Spaces of Artist Education interest group (Society for Artistic Research). A considerable part of his work consists in the production of theory essays and performative writings in collaboration with several editorial projects. His work has been presented, produced, co-produced and/or supported by several art festivals, cultural institutions and research centres, such as: Teatro Praga, Rua das Gaivotas 6, Estrutura, Associação Prado, Alkantara, Advancing Performing Arts Project, Temps d’Images, Centro Cultural de Belém, Binaural, Circular, Teatro Viriato, Nomad Dance Academy, Tanzfabrik, ZonaD mobile platform, Festival Paragem, Museu de Serralves, TAGV, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, Festival Citemor, m-cult, Aalto University, Université Paris Nanterre, Museum of Impossible Forms, New Theatre Helsinki, Transforma, Atelier Real and Dance kiosk. He has curated various artistic and educational programmes, more recently within the scope of SLURPS - näyttämö (Helsinki). Currently an Associated Artist at O Espaço do Tempo (Montemor-o-Novo) and member of Globe Art Point (Helsinki). Guest artist-researcher in the project STAGES - Sustainable Theatre Alliance for a Green Environmental Shift (2023-25), in a co-production with Teatro Nacional D. Maria II (Lisbon). Since 1999, his work has already been shown in Portugal, France, United Kingdom, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, Croatia, Finland, Romania, USA, Brazil and Canada.