Ongoing Beginnings took place at UPTEC PINC, a space dedicated to creative industries in northern Portugal. It emerged from the possibility of building a shared space between the two first-year doctoral programmes at FBAUP, Art Education and Arts, made possible by Catarina Almeida’s teaching roles in both. It became the first joint encounter between these programmes, opening a situated dialogue around how artistic practice and artistic research intersect.
Taking place at the very beginning of the academic year, we chose to think about beginnings, not as a biographical exercise, but as a way to reflect on how a practice starts, how it is narrated, and how that initial movement continues to resonate within an artistic research process.
We approached the beginning of a research process not as the application of a predefined method, but as a situated construction shaped by impressions, acts of forgetting, resistances, and stories much like the beginning of an artistic practice. Rather than asking "what is your research about?", we asked: How do you begin your artistic practice? What do you have to forget? What do you resist? What insists on returning?
Before the session, we invited everyone to bring an image and a short synopsis of their most recent artistic beginning. This invitation worked as a device to situate the reflection within lived practice, avoiding abstract conceptual categories detached from experience. Grounding the discussion in the materials of each practice created a space where perspectives could meet, resonate, and shift one another.
Through a domino game made from images, selected online for their ability to suggest different kinds of beginnings, and short excerpts from Jean Lancri's O meio como ponto zero (The Middle as Zero Point, 2002), we fostered connections. The text served not as theoretical authority but as a methodological opening, framing beginnings as already in the middle and resisting the illusion of a fixed or transparent point of origin.
What these dynamics made perceptible was how questions emerged through who was present, what was brought, how stories intersected or diverged, and how a shared space could hold different temporalities of practice.
Lancri, Jean(2002). Modestas Proposições sobre as Condições de uma Pesquisa em Artes Plásticas na Universidade. In Brites, Blanca; Tessler, Elida [Eds.], O meio como ponto zero. Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 15-35.
