MOUTHS FULL unaccomplished cine-fabulations

MOUTHS FULL unaccomplished cine-fabulations​

I will share a piece of audio-visual-textural fabulation experimenting with quirky (re)citational practices and ways of reading, sounding and mouthing across indoor and outdoor archives, as ways of (re)encountering knowledge and interrogating/reimagining forms of (ac)knowledgement, (un)knowing and, most of all, (un)owning. (Not easy to hear the differences between borrowing from, drawing from, extracting from). The assemblage revisits convoluted landscapes of socio-political and epistemic complicities, between the genealogy of modern liberalism as a project of colonial divisions of humanity and the contemporary “society of knowledge” — which is also the society of (self)performance and global computing (control).​

Paula Caspão lives and works between Lisbon and Paris, in the blur of theory and fiction, artistic research and archival practices. Since 2005, she has worked extensively on modes of (un)knowing and their specific sensorium, addressing the collective dimensions of reading, writing, translating and editing. She has presented T-Fi (theory fiction) pieces across Europe, Australia and the USA, combining methodologies from the fields of expanded choreography, experimental cinema and literature, performance and cinema studies, feminist science and technology studies, and anticolonial environmental infrastructure studies. In the company of many, her current research addresses the kinds of (im)material labour, resource extraction and socio-environmental damage implicated in the making and maintenance of museums, archives, history and artificial intelligence. As for institutional life, Paula is a researcher affiliated with the Centre for Theatre Studies and a guest professor on the PhD and MD programmes in Theatre Studies and the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Lisbon. She is also an associate researcher at the Institute for Contemporary History of the University NOVA of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in Philosophy (epistemology and aesthetics) from the University of Paris Nanterre (2010) and has been a visiting scholar in performance studies at the Tisch School of the Arts of New York University (2018).