RG Coordinator

Ana Balona de Oliveira

 

Integrated Researchers

Amanda Tavares	Ana Catarina Pinho	Basia Sliwinska	Bruno Marques	Cristina Pratas Cruzeiro
Dieison Marconi	Giulia Lamoni	Ivo Braz	Margarida Brito Alves	Paula Ribeiro Lobo
Paula Varanda	Susana C. Gaspar

 

Collaborating Researchers

Alexandra do Carmo	Catarina Rosendo	Cristiana Tejo	Daniela Salazar	Israel Guarda
José Oliveira	Luís D. Rivero Moreno	Luísa Salvador	Luísa Soares de Oliveira	Miguel Meruje
Miguel Mesquita Duarte	Raquel Ermida

 

Postgraduate Students

Adriana Prado	Benedita Salema Roby	Carolina Machado	Elisabete Paiva	Felipe Xavier
Filipa Almeida	Fernando Duarte	Flora Paim	Francisca Gigante	Gustavo Borges Corrêa
Josseline Black-Barnett	João Viotti	Manuel Furtado dos Santos	Márcia Quintas de Carvalho	Pedro Gonçalves
Raquel Ribeiro Santos	Rita Barreira	Sofia Steinvorth	Tainan Barbosa	Thaynã Targa
Telma Lopes Pereira	Yana Naidenov

 

External Collaborators

Catarina Pires | Frederico Caiafa | Iriê Campos Júnior | Katherine Sirois | Óscar Faria | Rita Gomes Ferrão

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Keywords

Architecture, public art, and spatial practices

Participatory, relational, and collaborative strategies

Transnationalism, migration, diaspora, and globalization

Portraiture, identities, representation, decoloniality, and feminisms

Activist research, performativity, inclusive citizenship

Lens-based media, documentation, and archives

Public policies on memory, propaganda, and censorship

 

Description

CASt is a dynamic research group composed of integrated, collaborating, visiting, and non-PhD researchers, closely linked to Art History and Artistic Studies PhD programs. Covering research from the early 20th century to the present, CASt employs interdisciplinary and transnational methodologies with a strong ethical and political dimension. It explores themes such as human rights, participatory democracy, inclusive citizenship, activism, and the transformative potential of the arts through four main research lines:

1. Spatial Practices, coord. by Alves, takes spatial practices in contemporary art as its main focus, privileging a conception of space connected to materiality and constructiveness, but also comprises the multiple activations of space based on participative, relational and collaborative strategies.

2. Transnational, Decolonial and Feminist Art Practices, coord. by Lamoni and Balona, develops transnational approaches to art history nourished by other areas of knowledge production like post- and decolonial studies and intersectional feminism, with a specific, though not exclusive, focus on the Global South. It addresses issues pertaining to migration, diaspora and globalization, as well as identities and representation.

3. The Photography & Film Studies research line, coordinated by Marques and Marconi, critically examines lens-based media through an interdisciplinary approach. It explores how visual representations of history and memory shape collective imaginaries and knowledge production, interrogating official narratives and the roles of documentation, archives, and memory in power dynamics. Additionally, it investigates how contemporary art engages with propaganda, censorship, and counter-narratives to reshape historical awareness and cultural memory, while reclaiming stories, narratives, aesthetic sensibilities, and emancipated forms of self-representation of historically invisibilized subjects, identities, experiences, genders, and sexualities.

4. Activism and Performativity in the Arts, coord. by Cruzeiro and Ermida,  delves into the different activist and performative expressions that result from the mutual impact of arts and politics. Our research analyzes the artistic dynamics that directly impact society, the collaborative efforts and active participation of artists and/or activists, as well as self-organized artistic and political movements or groups. Additionally, we explore how these social actors mediate with public institutions and how they intervene in and appropriate public spaces.