** NOTE: In case you did not received an email notification regarding the reception of your proposal, please forward the email with your proposal to pa.portuguesa2016@gmail.com or pa.performance2016@gmail.com **
** New Deadline: 25th of April 2016 **
PAP – Performance Art Platform – aims at bringing together researchers who have been developing their research on Portuguese performance art. Opening this platform with a symposium, using the internationally coined term “Performance art”, instead of the Portuguese term “arte da performance”, is in itself part of a story we would like to emphasize: the fact that performance art in Portugal has been hidden or misrepresented in Portuguese art history.
Often unknown to the new generation of artists that have been using this medium, performance art has been systematically overlooked by the history of Portuguese art, being characterized by what the art theorist and artist Ernesto de Sousa called the “history-without-history” of the Portuguese avant garde. We believe, however, that the history of this art form has a key role when discussing the social performativity of the Portuguese people, mainly regarding issues of the revolution, the dictatorship, the colonial war, or the return to Portugal of Portuguese people living in the the colonies, or even more recently, their memory, absence or post-memory. If, on the one hand, we intend to address these contemporary practices; on the other, we intend to contextualize them within a historical perspective.
Aware of the blurred lines that define this artistic practice and theory, our aim is that this Symposium becomes a forum for debate between people with very different backgrounds and perspectives. From artists to curators and art conservators, from sociologists to philosophers or cultural programmers, from historians to anthropologists, this meeting aims at confronting ideas and interdisciplinary experiences. We hope that this International Symposium on Portuguese Performance Art is the first step towards a national and international network of artists and researchers.
For this symposium, there are two types of calls. For the first one, we are looking for paradigmatic case studies that can provide interesting debates around theoretical questions. The second call is related to more theoretical papers. The topics of interest here are as follows:
– History of Portuguese performance art: case studies
– The “absence” of performance art in Portuguese art history
– Contexts of creation and production within Portuguese performance art
– Distribution contexts and internationalization within Portuguese performance art
– Influences between national and international panoramas in Portuguese performance art
– Continuities and ruptures in the history of Portuguese performance art
– New genres of performance art in Portugal
– Methods for the study and historicization of performance art
– Archives and preservation of performance art: case studies
– Performance art documentation
– Preservation and presentation of performance art
– Memory and Transmission of performance art: case studies
– Portuguese performance art: memory and post-memory (Estado Novo; the Colonial War / Return; Revolution)
– Representations of the Portuguese identity in performance art
Abstracts containing a maximum of 300 words should be submitted to propose papers of 20 minutes. These should be accompanied by a short biography of the author (s) (max. 150 words), which that should include affiliation and contact information. Proposals must be sent to pa.portuguesa2016@gmail.com by 25th April 2016. Notification of whether the proposal has been accepted or not will be sent to the authors by 10th of May 2016.
Selected authors will be invited to submit a paper of 5000 words in English for publication. The work must be original and unpublished (to be sent by 31st July 2016 and subject to a peer review process).
We cannot subsidize participants, but authors are exempt from registration fees.