Open Studio: Baralho Amparo & Encanto at Espaço Alkantara

AND Lab’s ongoing research is Baralho Amparo & Encanto [Sustenance & Enchantment Card Set] - a publication that is also a set of cards - that aims to bring together, investigate and systematise the ritual practices emerging from the application of the Modus Operandi AND and its conceptual tools.

Part of a creation in progress that will extend over time, Baralho Amparo & Encanto thus operates as a complement to the book Caixa-Livro AND.

Emphasising that it is on the somatic plane that the conceptual tools are activated in an embodied way, the ritual practices take “psychosomagia” as their methodology - inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky's concept of psychomagia. The soma, broadly understood as something that does not end at the edges of the skin or is reduced to the physical body, is assumed to be a field of inseparability in which it is possible to repair the irreparable on the personal, transpersonal and infrapersonal levels - ranging from the microscopic to the cosmic universe, passing through the human.

From the process of creating the Artefact Baralho Amparo & Encanto, intermediate objects of various kinds emerge: from video performance, performance-installation and performance-presentation, which will be integrated into the final Artefacto while at the same time taking shape and constituting themselves independently throughout the process.

The proposed experiences – which are ritual performances – allow the process of understanding and incorporating the conceptual tools to take place on a “sensational” level, that is, on the level of sensations, providing access to the sensitive experience of inseparability.

Throughout the residency, we focus on five pairs of embodied experiences, which will therefore be ‘and-bodied’ in five psychosomagic actions: Dis-solution and Re-mediation / Dis-cernment and Re-membering / Dis-illusion and Restoration / Dis-cision and Restitution / (Dis)Integration and Recall, which will be offered to the public in an open sharing session at the end of the residency, on March 28 at 6pm.

— AND Lab

Credits

Artistic direction Fernanda Eugenio Creation and performance Fernanda Eugenio, Ana Côrrea, Ary Zara, Constança Carvalho Homem, Manoela Rangel, and Mariana Pimentel Production Luís Filipe Fernandes and Mariana Pimentel Management Rita Maia Communication Eduardo Hall Design and digital platform management Alexandre Eugenio Audiovisual recording Violeta Mora

About AND Lab

AND Lab | Centre for Research in Art-Thought & Politics of Coexistence is a platform for practical research dedicated to the continuous development, transmission, sharing and application of the Modus Operandi AND (MO_AND). MO_AND is a game that activates ethical-aesthetic, somatic-political and experiential research into relationships and reciprocity, based on a radical commitment to “repairing the irreparable”, created by anthropologist and artist Fernanda Eugenio. As a system, MO_AND involves constellations of conceptual tools, games and ritual practices.