Encounters such as Sharing the Game, Ongoing Beginnings, and Memory in Practice I challenge conventional formats of research and teaching by fostering porous, collective, and process-based approaches within the university. Rather than being organised around predefined theoretical reference points, these encounters open the academic environment from within, allowing research to unfold through situated encounters.
At the same time, we extended this field of action beyond the university by moving into public cultural venues such as UPTEC PINC, Batalha Centro de Cinema, and Mira Fórum. These contexts allow us to circulate outside institutional boundaries, activating new forms of engagement with the public sphere through shared artistic situations. What occurs inside academic settings becomes permeable to wider social and cultural dynamics, enabling the questions, methods, and uncertainties of artistic research to resonate in different environments and with diverse audiences.
Although many of us have been connected to FBAUP, as undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral students, both past and present, the diversity of backgrounds, positions, and stages of formation has already broadened how we perceive and practice research. It shows that thinking through artistic practice is not confined to any academic degree or moment, but emerges through dialogue across experiences, temporalities, and perspectives, becoming an artistic matter through sharing.
The MINA website is a work in progress. We wish it to function as both a public space and a research apparatus — a living archive that gathers fragments, texts, images, and diagrams produced throughout the encounters. This documentation shifts alongside our ways of observing how practices intersect, leave traces, and generate new questions. While initially imagined as a tool for attracting new collaborators, the website has also become a site for reflecting on how, where, and through which forms research is shared and encountered.