Tempestade Mental (Brain-storm) is synonymous with a self-governed youth parliament. In this context, participants receive an interactive and permeable multimedia script. They can work on it freely – without the presence of adults. Indeed, for 90 minutes, they develop a laboratory for engaging in dialogue. Thus, reflecting and creating images of their own future.

The Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT, Lisbon PT) is establishing a series of initiatives to advance and disseminate new experimental modes of higher education and research, within the Anthropocene Curriculum. Indeed, Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science initiatied the Anthropocene Curriculum in 2013, and it is nowadays a collaborative network spanning around the globe.

“Slow disasters” are events whose damage and disruption result from factors developed over a long time, such as climate change, environmental degradation, desertification or wildfires. In this Conference, Scott Knowles addresses the topic of risk, governance, vulnerability and resilience in relation to slow disasters.

Ten years ago, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty published “The Climate of History: Four Theses”. This was the first of several Anthropocene-focused articles that turned out to be as influential as controversial. Indeed, Chakrabarty’s work fostered an extensive discussion on the relevance of political and socio-economic divisions between the northern and southern hemispheres, namely in the threats to survival.

Tempestade Mental (Brain-storm) is synonymous with a self-governed youth parliament. In this context, participants receive an interactive and permeable multimedia script. They can work on it freely – without the presence of adults. Indeed, for 90 minutes, they develop a laboratory for engaging in dialogue. Thus, reflecting and creating images of their own future.

Silence is not a luxury, but rather crucial to physical and mental health. However, we cannot celebrate silence acritically. Being silenced is what happens to the victims of abuse. Furthermore, the concept of bad noise is often controversial. Even silence has its politics. For two days, writers, artists, architects, astrophysicists and philosophers, all get together to discuss the importance of silence.

Daniel Christian Wahl’s live streaming conference on how to redesign the human impact on Earth. In Wahl’s perspective, both as a biologist and sustainable development expert, the capitalist system is no longer working for the majority of the world’s population. Would a new paradigm enable us to become more resistant to the test that the recent Coronavirus ordeal presents to the global economy?

Tempestade Mental (Brain-storm) is synonymous with a self-governed youth parliament. In this context, participants receive an interactive and permeable multimedia script. They can work on it freely – without the presence of adults. Indeed, for 90 minutes, they develop a laboratory for engaging in dialogue. Thus, reflecting and creating images of their own future.

Marlene Monteiro Freitas is internationally acknowledged by her virtuoso and expressive choreographs. Moreover, she is one of the most original and influential voices in modern-day choreography. In 2018, she was awarded the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale.

The Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos took the natural phenomena of collective movements of birds and fish, as a starting point to create a dance performance. From there, he zoomed in on ions, electrically charged atoms, only to rediscover the same basic forces of attraction and repulsion that govern not only all existing life, but also all human relationships.

People fleeing from slavery in Brazil would go to the places called Quilombo, in search of shelter. As a result, autonomous communities survived in a profound ecological relationship with the territory. Today, they still hold important practices and provide valuable knowledge. António Bispo dos Santos is a writer, a Quilombo-master, and a farmer.

Tempestade Mental (Brain-storm) is synonymous with a self-governed youth parliament. In this context, participants receive an interactive and permeable multimedia script. They can work on it freely – without the presence of adults. Indeed, for 90 minutes, they develop a laboratory for engaging in dialogue. Thus, reflecting and creating images of their own future.

Will we change human behaviour if we transform our idea of “energy”? 2021 marks the 35th anniversary of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, which took place on 26 April 1986. Considering the event from a philosophical perspective, we will look at the profound connection between different ways of obtaining energy. The catastrophe of our century not only lies in other nuclear disasters, but also in our continued adherence to a destructive structure for the production of energy, which is threatening to bring an end to various forms of life on the planet.

Faced with the ever more real prospect of an uninhabitable planet, it is urgent to imagine a closer, more inclusive and more generous relationship with nature and the non-human aspects of life. Inspired by a series of eco-feminist proposals, the historian Teresa Castro suggests that images and the cinema can help us to expand the limits of our attention, thus laying the foundations for an ecological reason.

The work of the artist Gabriela Albergaria focuses on understanding the acculturation of landscape and nature, through the migratory processes and globalization from the fifteenth century onward. The artist uses multiple typologies, such as: sculpture, installation, works for public space, drawing and photography. This exhibition provides an overview of her activity over the last 15 years.

Focusing on the fate of the most vulnerable people of society, Zeldin’s realistic theatre is both gentle and uncompromising. LOVE invites the audience to bear witness of their precarious conditions and continuous struggles, but also of the need and power of love in our times.

The anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro says that, for the indigenous people of Brazil, “Contradiction makes sense” and this is one of the cornerstones of the thinking of original peoples. The alleged interferences of the social media in recent electoral processes lead us to conclude that the “healthy” media are those that do not present just one point of view, but instead present several views, which are preferably contradictory in nature. Is education for citizenship an Education for Contradiction? Education for Fright.

The role and position of our planet has, once again, been profoundly shaken by the new sciences that reveal how human actions can cause the Earth to react in unexpected ways. If Galileo taught us that the Earth moves, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis have discovered a dynamic and self-regulated Gaia. And, once again, the whole organisation of society seems to be called into question. A lecture-performance by Bruno Latour and Frédérique Aït-Touati, in which the social and cosmic order is described as “heading towards an unparalleled political and economic collapse”, due to the climate crisis.

Networking as part of the ACT project is an important segment, in which partners are sharing and discussing the activities’ state of the art. This meeting was organised and hosted by Culturgest, Lisbon with participation of other project partners and representatives from: Arts Admin/London, Bunker/Ljubljana, Kaaitheater/Brussels, COAL/Paris, Domino/Zagreb, Kampnagel/Hamburg, NTIL/Riga, Theater Rotterdam/Rotterdam, and Lokomotiva /Skopje.

Séverine Kodjo-Grandvaux introduces an interdisciplinary project that brings together scientists, legal experts, artists and other professionals to think about the ties that bind humans and other living beings. Vibrating in the World invites us to imagine a presence on the planet that is both an embodiment of the self, and also – evoking Édouard Glissant and his philosophy of relation – the act of becoming sensitive to all living things and to our cosmic condition.

How has colonial history marked our relationship with nature? In a two late afternoons program, we gather several disciplines of knowledge to open the photographic archives of contemporary Portuguese history, trying to see them as documents that, simultaneously, reveal traces of multiple ecologies, and are the expression of how colonial history marked nature.

Based on photographs of scientific missions organised by the Portuguese Institute of Tropical Scientific Research (Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical (IICT)), and within the scope of project Photo Impulse, which focuses on photographic collections of Portuguese scientific and geodesic missions in Africa throughout the 20th century, this roundtable discussion establishes a dialogue between the epistemological perspectives of that colonial scientific past and contemporary ways of thinking philosophically, artistically and conceptually about the relationship of humans with plants and botany.

Marco Martins proposes in WILD a reflection on the use of the mask in ritualistic practices that, since time immemorial, collectively mark crucial moments in Europe, such as the equinoxes and solstices, integrating characters such as the Wild Man, the Bear, the Goat or the Devil.

Based on Marco Martins’ new performance, this debate hacks the multiple dramaturgies of masks. As a medium and stage for the figuration of the Other, masks show, hide and perform profound human technologies of the game. Face and mask differ and resonate with each other. From supernatural beliefs, masks deal with what fascinates and is feared, turning the wearer into hybrids beyond the culture/nature, animal/human and true/disguised dichotomies. 

The synergies and challenges that the encounter between the biological and technological worlds imposes us today have been the focus of this collective’s attention. Their works tend to combine living and non-living structures, whose interaction allows us to understand the complexity of these same structures and to speculate on their potential collaborations in creating sustainable systems. For the exhibition at Culturgest Porto – within the France-Portugal Season Croisée, and in close collaboration with the French partner, COAL, which will host the exhibition afterwards – the collective is preparing a work that reassesses and seeks alternatives to the use of batteries.