Um Samuel Silva:
In recent years Samuel Silva's research focus, has been on learning environments informed by contemporary artistic practices in schools and museums. In this sense, he has had his attention on collaborative artistic practices, participatory art and relational aesthetics. In his phd, he has researched the interstitials territories between the collaborative artistic strategies with communities and non-formal education.

Besides being a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, he has collaborated as artist-educator, for the past eight years, with the educational service of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Serralves. More recently Silva is starting to coordinate an educational service in International Museum of Contemporary Sculpture of Santo Tirso (the only one in Portugal).
 

Sometimes making something leads to nothing, but_____ 
 

Sometimes making something leads to nothing, but_____ is based on the participants themselves and in their individual construction of subjectivity. From sensorial collective experience to the individual introspection we will challenge our imagination and symbolic language through performative drawings.

In the first part, we will focus on the externality of the body through performative games, on transit between group and silent individual experience. The emotional and psychological dimension will occupy our attention in the second part, where participants will be encouraged to remind their affections and most significant memories for posterior translation in a poetic installation. How we see and represent ourselves?

{Part 1 — 2h}

From the collective to the individual.
Participants will be invited to play together with a giant piece of plastic film: stretching, getting involved, wrapping up... Then and after this first sensorial and playful experience, we will lie down on the floor and blindfolded we ́ll draw our body, together on the same surface (plastic film), a kind of group drawing. At the end we will talk about the drawings: what we does not draw, what we forget, what details we care, etc.

{Part 2 — 2h}

From the individual level to the group.
After the initial phase, participants will be invited to enter on a circular structure (made of corrugated cardboard) metaphorically illustrates a nest or a belly. In the center, there will be the circle (uterus). Silently and using the resource materials available, including own clothes, participants will be encourage to build a line in space towards the center (womb). This poetic line (done with different materials, directions and aesthetic decisions) represents the individual memories of each, from the most recent to the most remote.
At the end we will have a collective installation in the circular space (full of lines, words, and other elements) and the participants who feel comfortable for sharing their experience can do it with the rest of the group.

Cloud of contemporary art references:
Augusto Boal, Lygia Clark, Oskar Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim.