My motivation to participate in MINA arises from the conviction that artistic practice does not follow linear paths, and that the moments preceding project development deserve to be made visible, reflected upon, and shared. These often imperceptible moments shape how an idea transforms into practice, moving through doubts, intuitions, and quiet discoveries.
As an artist and university lecturer, I feel that giving space to these moments also means creating room for reflection, dialogue, and learning that extends beyond the act of making itself. The project creates a horizontal ground for exchange and questioning, where different profiles and practices meet and recognize one another, stimulating imagination, confronting perspectives, and nurturing collective learning.
It is in this intertwining of experiences, strategies, and doubts that I perceive the power of contamination in artistic thought and action: not immediately visible, but capable of opening new paths, expanding ways of seeing, and transforming modes of doing. I feel, in particular, that MINA invites us to reflect on the continuity of artistic practice — how it sustains, reinvents, and keeps itself active beyond logics of utility or economy. The vitality of a practice lies in not-knowing and wanting-to-know, in experimentation, searching, and sharing.
Filipa
Since entering the university in the field of visual arts, I have faced the challenge of understanding how knowledge is constructed through artistic work. This challenge becomes even more significant because my practice operates at the intersection between art and education. It is not a simple task, as the schooling of knowledge — as a civilizational and disciplinary project — has accustomed us to validate learning through predefined instruments, measurable results, and binary quantitative and qualitative criteria.
However, I believe this exercise can make our relationship with materialities and poetics more complex, with impact on both artistic practice and art learning. My motivation to be part of MINA, where we have been developing tools and experiences to think and share about artistic practices, stems from this interest connected to my formation as both artist and educator. It also extends to my work as a researcher, where I have collaborated with other artists to build critical perspectives on our practices in relation to specific territories — always returning to the ongoing exercise of speaking and thinking through creative processes.
Luana
The MINA project emerged in connection with my doctoral research and from the urge to investigate sharing between artistic practices, not based on results, but on exchange. Rather than analyzing a finished object, I was interested in observing processes, gestures, and conversations that, although often invisible, are themselves forms of knowledge, motivation, and artistic reasoning. I was less concerned with permanence than with the intensity of shared experience and its capacity to open new perspectives, developments, and continuities. I kept asking myself: what changes when the focus shifts from results to exchange?
This inquiry expanded within the collective, in dialogue with Catarina, Luana, and Filipa. While my initial motivation was to broaden the social and political scope of artistic practice through shared encounters, within the group this question gradually became methodology. Each member brought a distinct position, and that diversity required sharing to be continually negotiated, tested, and situated.
Rosinda
I am interested in how MINA fosters ways of sharing and of collaboration in research and postgraduation environments, and how it builds on making people talk about their methods and intersect with each other's experiences. Our practices seek cross-pollination and contamination between different forms of knowledge and different practices that expand the realm of the sensible; collective moments and being together as generative inputs; and indeterminacy and late effects as possibilities . By looking forward alternative modes of comnunicating research we are attempting to test the limits of formal settings of institutional knowledge.
Catarina