Ground LAB

The project is born out of the awareness of the immaterial loss of knowledge about doing. Various technologies, tools and processes have been voted for abandonment and forgetfulness, sometimes definitive, based on a vision of speed and technological progression that suppresses previous knowledge. It is also based on the condition that artistic research and practice are favorable territory for the introduction or technological reintroduction, as a tool that can enhance recovery and eventually innovation in use, application and interpretation.

The territory will be the base of the laboratory, as a space for the primary introduction of materials, but also for the technical and symbolic procedures associated with it. The project also comprises a double condition: the involvement of transdisciplinary research teams and of different degrees, and the continuous relationship between research, reconstruction and implementation by art, as principles that generate a collection, reconstruction, renewal and application of technologies, tools , procedures or matters.

Thus, Ground LAB focuses on the development of research in different areas of activity, from printmaking, sculpture, painting, ceramics, glass, textiles, and illustration, also working with areas such as botany , chemistry, engineering, architecture, among others.

The team will be composed of researchers from different cycles, divided into research groups that work based on concrete proposals, starting with a process of technological archeology, then leading it back to poetic and artistic uses in areas other than those from which they are extracted, promoting new perspectives, practical implications and renewing know-how.

Ground LAB assumes the importance of know-how as the central territory of artistic practice, involving and promoting knowledge through laboratory experimentation. At the same time, it enhances the revisiting of knowledge that is lost, registering and testing it as a form of theoretical and empirical knowledge, in transdiscilinary and and intergenerational contexts.

The project intends to host investigations financed or not by FCT or similar, as well as receiving proposals from individuals or groups that fit the project’s purposes.