Surfaces – Conditions of Appearing: Making and Emerging is the second edition of an interdisciplinary gathering, jointly organised by iA* Research in Arts and PRAXIS of the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Beira Interior and, from this edition onwards, by lab2pt and the School of Architecture, Art and Design of the University of Minho.
As in the first edition, our purpose remains to promote a broad interdisciplinary approach that may generate reflection from the places of knowledge and experience we bring. These may arise from philosophy, architecture, design, music, mathematics, engineering, the arts, other fields, and from the crossings between them.
Conditions of Appearing: Making and Emerging
The contemporary urgency to manifest and illuminate what is on the surface neglects the thickness of the processes and mediations that sustain it. The readiness of the ready-made becomes universalised, yet it is sustained by the obscuring of making; it requires the fiction of the “already made” while subordinating means, resources and materials that matter only in this accessory condition. What takes place is a superficialisation of surfaces themselves: they are stripped of their thickness, leaving us with an experience turned away from what constitutes their very body.
For this reason, it is important to practise the question of the conditions of appearing. These are mediations, narratives and materialities whose meaning and experience deserve to be entered into, as if we were taking the surface into the depths, as if bringing it to the surface, yet reversing the direction of movement, from outside to within.
To emerge is a beautiful way of saying that something comes to the Earth’s surface. There are rock outcrops when veins and seams from the depths appear exposed on the terrestrial surface. There is also the emergence of subjects, as if opening them so that truth itself may eventually emerge too, as a revealing and a happening condensed in the idea of something becoming a flower. Something metamorphoses in order to give rise to a flower, its petals becoming a delicate surface of the world.
In this second gathering on surfaces, the challenge is to bring forth the conditions of this emergence. We wish to trace back the genesis of what is experienced in a legible and meaningful way, plunging into the depth of fundamental pairings:
Material / Immaterial
Scientific / Artistic
Visible / Invisible
Technical / Symbolic
Organisation:
André Barata | PRAXIS / UBI
Andreia Garcia | lab2pt – EAAD / UM
Sara Velez | iArtes* / UBI
Susana Gaudêncio | lab2pt – EAAD / UM
Design: Sara Constante