Maria Regina Ramos (1992) was born in Vila Nova de Cerveira (North of Portugal) and has a Master’s degree in Fine Arts – Painting, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP), with the project “Closer Look: Fragments of a selected landscape – the garden” (2019), public defense in which she obtained the maximum classification of 20 points. As a non-doctoral researcher, recently integrated at the i2ADS – Institute for Research in Art, Design and Society and at Vicarte – Glass and Ceramics for the Arts, she has developed theoretical and practical research work, as well as contributed and collaborated in several publications and research events, with a main focus on the Visual Arts context. In addition to participating in congresses and scientific events, deeply linked to research in Art, she has been developing, as an artist, regular production since 2015, participating in a large number of events, competitions and exhibitions on a national and international level. In terms of thought and artistic practice, her interest has been centered around the fragmentation of the real, in order to question, from concepts such as “desterritorialization” and “reterritorialization”, the perceptive limits of the notion of “territory”, linking a phenomenological, kinesthetic and experiential experimentation of a “micro” and “macro” cosmos of an archaeological nature, to a more conventional reframing of the notion of “landscape”. This issue is currently being developed in the Doctoral Program of Fine Arts at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, under a research grant from the FCT – National Funding Agency for Science, Research and Technology.

Thesis title
Artistic practice as a diachronic place: From the artificialization of nature to the naturalization of artifice 

FCT reference
2020.05498.BD

Abstract
The Project Work, to be carried out within the scope of the Doctorate in Fine Arts, aims to understand the relationships between the terminologies “artificialization of nature” and “naturalization of artifice”, and their relevance to the territory of Contemporary Art. Based on these ideas, it intends to identify and understand definitions and productions where artistic action appears, in phenomenological terms, as a central component of mediation, recreation and renewal of the nature/artifice binomial. It also intends to develop an experimental laboratory and an authorial practice that shows how questions of interaction and intersection between “natural” and “artificial” can be applied to artistic and creative processes. To this end, it seeks to assess possible political, ecological and environmental implications, and to contribute in an innovative way to produce incursions that reconcile aesthetic dimensions with cognitive, operational and intervention dimensions in the territory of apparent ambiguity and possible interdependence between “nature” and “artífice”, between “nature” and “culture”.

Supervision
Domingos Loureiro (supervisor) and Teresa Almeida (co-supervisor)

More info

• DD12-5323-D4BB