Ana Rito & Hugo Barata. «Curatorial Studio for Research in Museums»

In the context of the project Constellations: a choreography of minimal gestures, which started in 2019, the artists, curators and researchers Ana Rito and Hugo Barata are creating the CURATORIAL STUDIO FOR RESEARCH IN MUSEUMS. After twenty years of work, the duo propose to develop a research space that combines both artistic and curatorial practice and education, in partnership with various cultural agents and universities, in order to implement plural and intersecting areas of reflection.

Taking the museum space as a receptacle for various heterochronic elements, and the exhibition format as a place for historical, cultural, political, and educational inclusion, the aim is to promote a group of conceptual dislocations and a series of contingent actions. Following the Constellations project, this curatorial study seeks to highlight the shaking up of stabilised historical periods, discontinuing or unsettling their immobility on the basis of a modern and contemporary collection, into which cuts, new geometries, and links, intervals, and event-related or more prolonged temporalities are introduced.
These actions will lead to investigation into different types of production of material and knowledge generated through research, demonstrating a potential in the creation of proposals and opportunities to generate links between the curatorial, educational and artistic creation space. Another point of interest is the production of reflection and theory in the field of recent curatorial practices, based on the most diverse themes, implementing a laboratorial model applicable to different formats of presentation, dissemination and research. The continuation of the constellation-like gesture, which, based on readings of Walter Benjamin and after Theodor W. Adorno, led in 2019 to a sequence of interventions in the permanent collection of Museu Coleção Berardo, seeks to reflect on a non-hegemonic, inclusive, and self-verifiable museum. As stated by Claire Bishop, in Radical Museology, the notion of the museum as a common archive should be approached in the sense of a universal resource and, as a resource, it should, in the present day, promote a close and equal relationship between the visitor and the institution.

The first moment of this "Curatorial Studio" will take place on April 10 at Museu Coleção Berardo. Stay tuned for this month's newsletter.

ANA RITO (Lisbon, 1978)
Ana Rito is a visual artist, curator, researcher and teacher. She has a Doctorate in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon, specialising in installation. Since 2000, she has developed projects that combine artistic and curatorial practice, specialising in the performativity of the moving image and the dynamics of the spectator, at the heart of the exhibition display. She is currently a researcher at CEIS20_University of Coimbra, where she is the coordinator of the line of research on Art and Performance. She teaches in master’s courses in Curatorial Studies and doctoral programmes in Contemporary Art at the College of Arts of the University of Coimbra, of which she is deputy director.

HUGO BARATA (Lisbon, 1978)
Visual artist, independent curator, teacher, researcher, and cultural mediator. He has a Doctorate specialising in Film and Media Arts from the Univ. Lusófona de Humanidades e Tecnologias — ULHT, Lisbon, with research into archives and contemporary art. Since 2000, he has worked as an independent researcher and curator, organising and producing group exhibitions with nationally and internationally renowned artists. He devises and oversees artistic-educational projects, research and supervision of exhibitions, conception and implementation of pedagogical activities, workshops, conferences, and long-term artistic and social intervention projects. He is an integrated researcher for COW — Centre for Other Worlds and as collaborator researcher for CICANT, both at ULHT, Lisbon. He teaches in the master’s courses of Games and Culture and Teaching of Visual Arts, and also in the bachelor’s courses of Design, Applied Communication and Photography, teaching Visual Culture, Contemporary Art, Media Theory and Drawing.

Photographic credit: David Rato