Considering Monoculture | Luísa Santos and Ana Fabíola Maurício

(c)Luísa Santos and Ana Fabíola Maurício - Foto: M HKA / Bram Goots, 2020
27 February - 27 February 2020
deBuren, Brussel

Title: Offsetting Sameness: Notes Towards Artistic and Institutional Polysemy and Practices of/on Monocultures and Multicultures

By the mid-20th century, with the aftermath of WWII, at a time when unity and the creation of a European identity was understood as essential for the survival of Europe, large-scale intensive farming methods appeared as a solution to maximize agricultural production resulting in vast areas of identical crops. Much like the agricultural monocultures, monocultural artistic and institutional practices can be both partly necessary to generate bursts of needed development and vastly damaging if unchecked. Evolving from the loaded and manifold agency of culture as a form of growth and cultivation of varied types of fields, as well as learning from recent proposals for a radical transformation of agriculture (Altieri 1995), this paper seeks to uncover the inscription of conflict, (counter-)memory, and resistance through the lenses of contemporary art within mono/multicultural processes/ realities/practices.

Bio: Luísa Santos is an independent curator based in Lisbon. With a practice grounded in research she is also a Senior Researcher and an Assistant Professor at the CECC and the Faculty of Human Sciences of UCP – the Catholic University of Portugal. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies, Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance, Berlin (2015), a Master’s Degree in Curating Contemporary Art, from the Royal College of Art, London (2008), and a Degree in Communication Design, from the Faculty of Fine Arts-University of Lisbon (2003). Since 2017, she has been the artistic director and project coordinator of ‘4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture’, a cooperation project co-funded by Creative Europe.

Ana Fabíola Maurício is Head of the Research and Innovation Office of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP). Project Manager and Researcher of ‘4Cs: from Conflict to Conviviality through Creativity and Culture’, a cooperation project co-funded by Creative Europe. She is Senior Researcher at CECC|UCP, co-founder and co-curator of the independent curatorial project nanogaleria. She holds a double-degree Ph.D. (2016) in Culture Studies by The Lisbon Consortium (FCH-UCP) and in Literary and Cultural Studies by the Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (JLU-Giessen, Germany), an M.A. degree in Media Studies, specialising in Cultural Management and Communication (2010, FCH-UCP), and a B.A. degree in Applied Foreign Languages in English and French (2007, FCH-UCP).