Retrospecting and concluding the investigative practice that has occupied Rogério Nuno Costa since 2015, in para-academic projects that co-exist at the intersections between Art, Science, Philosophy and Pop Culture, MULTIVERSIDADE proposes the production, presentation and problematisation of a speculative and "post-fictional" discourse that aims to predict the future of the University through the queer exercise of failure, as a device of resistance to hegemonic modes of knowledge production and sharing. The project has been materialising in inter- and trans-disciplinary, co-laborative and co-operative, horizontal and holistic, essentially investigative and laboratory work models (seminars, working/reading groups, workshops, collaborative publications, etc.), in partnership with festivals, independent training structures and academic institutions in Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Finland and Canada.
In 2021, the wealth of information (essentially textual) compiled over the years was condensed into a lecture-performance presented as an academic thesis (or its infinite abstract), elaborating and re-imagining utopian alternatives to the ultra-liberalisation of contemporary academia - the "university of numbers and rankings", the "university of excellence", as Bill Readings describes/criticises it in his essay The University in Ruins (1996) - in order to confront it with the possibility of a "university of multiples". A multiversity. The performance would inaugurate a new phase for the project (Post-Production), which during the biennium 2023-24 will unfold in a series of preparatory meetings for the "real", temporary and precarious construction of a multiversity, scheduled to take place in the context of Circular/Vila do Conde Performing Arts Festival in September 2024. The residency that will take place at Espaço do Tempo in October 2023, in the context of the Es.Col.Az.. project, will bring together a task force of artist-thinkers-researchers with the aim of discussing the means, modes, methods and operations with which we can/want to build a pluriverse university on shaky ground, an academy-as-performance, more or less nomadic, more or less peripheral, studying ex-titutional models for sharing para/post/anti-academic knowledge and listing discursive and material possibilities, potential collaborations, contexts and partnerships. In the end, and ideally, it is planned to perform an experimental and peripatetic model of MULTIVERSIDADE, to be developed in 2024.
Credits
Project coordination
Carlos Manuel Oliveira
Curatorship
Rogério Nuno Costa
Guest artists
Liliana Coutinho, Joclécio Azevedo, Fernanda Eugénio, Joana Braga
Production
Associação Parasita
Co-production
Santarém Cultura, 23 Milhas, ARS, Associação Circular, Espaço do Tempo
Support
Direcção Geral das Artes – Governo de Portugal
Es.Col.Az. is a network of artists who in the last years have been responsible for the conception and realization of independent courses in the performing arts in Portugal, aiming at the problematization of power/knowledge relations in contexts of learning and knowledge production, having the body and the collective as a focus. This network has been progressively formed through a series of meetings, having as a horizon the continuous sharing of researches focused on the conditions of learning, on the idea and modes of school, and how both are matters of investigation themselves, either by the realization of courses like those in which the artists/researchers of the network are involved, or by the rehearsal of the theoretical reflection that each one makes about those experiences.