MINA grew from the hypothesis that artistic matter emerges through informal, conversational, and unplanned gestures of exchange that hold the potential to generate knowledge.
We began as four artists and researchers — Rosinda Casais, Catarina Almeida, Luana Andrade, and Filipa Cruz — connected by a shared desire to exchange artistic practices. While Rosinda, Catarina, and Luana are involved in the conception, experimentation, and facilitation of the encounters, Filipa contributes mainly to the dissemination of the project among students.
From the outset, we were interested in observing how conversations, shared experiments, and collective reflections are not peripheral to artistic practice, but central to its unfolding. We sensed that each interaction, whether a critique, a discussion, or a moment of silence, could became a site where attention, meaning, and relation take shape. Our aim has been to test and expand this intuition, understanding sharing not as an add-on to practice, but as a web of exchanges capable of generating transformation: forms of motivation, expanded readings, broader awareness, and an enlarged field of relations.
With this ongoing research, the “we” of MINA is not a fixed group but a practice in itself. MINA is never only the four of us. Each encounter expands the collective through the perspectives, gestures, and urgencies of those who join. We aim to remain open: to grow through encounters we could not anticipate, to create situations in which different practices can meet and transform one another, to share publicly, and to invite new collaborators and participants.
" MINA ~ seeks to create conditions for the continuity of artistic matter
How can an artistic practice instigate its own continuity? This question is often framed through ideas of utility, shaped by social and economic structures that influence how artistic work is valued and sustained. Yet the challenges of artistic practice extend beyond economic concerns. They involve conditions of not-knowing and wanting-to-know, moments where meaning, direction, or motivation are still in formation.
Dialogues, debates, critiques, and contaminations — not always visible or acknowledged — play a crucial role in this process. Through these exchanges, practices undergo assimilations, filtrations, and transformations that quietly reshape ways of doing and thinking."
Excerpt from the first page of MINA's site