The research project Subtle-Body in Performance Art investigates the subtle dimensions of the body, in the field of fine arts, considering A/r/tography, a practice based-research (Irwin, 2017) as a field of knowledge, i.e. enquiring into the world through a continuous process of artistic creation (Fine Arts and Performance Art), and of writing, university teaching and learning, not separate but interconnected, as a way of relating and enriching experiences of the order of the sensible.

The project is based on the concept of the subtle-body, which seeks to recognise in the subtle dimension of bodies and in the creative act a pregnant dimension of life, as Etty Hillesum tells us, an invitation to trust events beyond their appearance. In the first instance, we start from understanding performance art as a space for events to happen, offering the possibility for the sensible to dialogue, and as an alternative for recovering the body as a creative and political environment (Garoian, 1999).

In terms of Fine Art Education the project recognises the value of introducing new curricular proposals in the academic context, namely to develop strategies and alternatives for researching and extending pedagogical practices in the arts through the body as tool, investing in national and international partnerships. In recent years, a number of theoretical reflections have contributed to recognising other ways of teaching and learning, particularly perspectives that break with contemporary Eurocentric thinking in pedagogical practices: “Decolonial Pedagogy” in which the creation of intercultural dialogues makes it possible to change the relations of educational praxis, the structures, conditions and power devices that maintain inequality and discrimination, (Walsh, 2023); “Curriculum-Placenta” understood as a metaphorical curriculum that resembles a container where the structure of the curriculum document houses the hidden dimension of the curriculum nourished by the subjectivities of students and teachers, (Acaso, 2009); “Pedagogia Antropofágica” which is the ‘devouring’ capacity of everything that is strange to the student, in other words, what is new and unknown to them and which is being explored, swallowed up, providing different and inspiring perspectives for the construction of theoretical and practical knowledge, thus creating a repertoire, (Barcelos, 2008); the “Ecologia dos Saberes” in which the body in the learning process is implicated in its sensory and cognitive relationship, because knowledge is essentially corporeal, (Santos, 2018).

Subtle Body is a completed project that took place between 2020 and 2025. Throughout these years, the body was assumed as matter, method, and territory of artistic research. It’s presented the different outputs of the project: performative programes and classes, exhibitions, artistic residencies, publications, conferences, and study groups. As such, it functions as a space where pedagogical methods, artistic research, and artistic practice can enter into dialogue.
The narrative tone that runs through these works emerges from a retrospective gaze: each action presented here marks a moment of activating the body as a critical, relational, and political device. What follows is the trajectory of this movement.
My performance disciplines within the BA in Fine Arts are pioneers (since 2015) in introducing Performance Art into the Fine Arts Department at ESAD.CR (UC Performance, Body and Device / UC Performance and Visuality-BA Fine Arts). Students tare invited to think the body within the context of studio-based practice, positioning it as both material and conceptual tool. As part of their final projects, students present live performances every semester, as well as exhibitions and poetic walks, occupying different spaces in the city of Caldas da Rainha — museums, schools, parks, and the cultural centre.
One of the key outcomes of this pedagogical and artistic process is the creation of two digital platforms that function simultaneously as archive and site of transmission, enabling students to situate their projects within broader artistic and theoretical frameworks.

Caixa Negra Exhibition

During the lockdown period caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (2020) the exhibition Caixa Negra took place at the Caldas da Rainha Tourist Office. Together with the students, and curated by Madalena Folgado, I worked on the concept of the “black box,” through which each participant symbolically opened her own box and shared something meaningful: an intimate story, an object, a dream. Still in isolation, when the outside world had become inaccessible, the interior was transformed into an act of sharing. Objects and images emerged as a territory of discovery.

Artistic-Research Residency: Expansive Territories (OSSO)

For five days (October 2020), I took part in the artistic research residency “Territórios Expansivos,” organized by OSSO (São Gregório, Óbidos). Upon arriving at the site, I began distributing books throughout the space that had been assigned to me—books I had brought in a suitcase from my studio, where they had been waiting to be read. These books revolve around themes I explore in my artistic and teaching practice (ESAD.CR), such as movement, image, embodiment, Art, what it means to teach “Art,” what is supposed to be taught in “Art,” and the importance of a subject’s curriculum.

From the various arrangements of the books—spread across the orange floor and placed on grey foam plinths—my movement through the space became shaped by the different possibilities of reading the books and the images within them. I began to recognize improvised relationships between their contents, and from this process mental images emerged, which I recorded in parallel. The readings were interrupted by walks through the surrounding natural landscape, made possible by intervals of sunlight between the rain. From these brief walks, I brought natural elements back inside, placing them in relation to certain pages of the books. (How do different bodily trajectories through space enable different reading orders and consequently the re-signification of parts of the texts?)

In the final phase of the residency, I developed a sound piece that materializes a possible relationship between the books, determined by the encounter between my body and their various contents. The microphone, a fixed axis in space, is the means through which one can listen and thus compose a mental image of the spatialization of that body and its contents. (What means do I have to make visible images of my body’s displacement in space through the sound piece? What new images emerge from the re-signification of the contents?)

The programme culminated in an editorial publication in partnership with the UNESCO Chair in Arts and Culture Management, Cities and Creativity at the Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, bringing together four invited artists to develop essays around the notion of expansion — disciplinary, geographical, social, and methodological. The visual-essay published emerged at a temporal distance from the residency period (December 2021). It arose from a need to attribute visuality—to make visible the infinitude of the spatialization of that body and of parts of the texts within the books. But not only that. In this project, I recognize the beginning of a method grounded in the relationship between artistic practice as research and teaching practice, aimed at finding modes of visual, sonic, or spatial transcription connected to the creative process. (Allowing oneself to be traversed by readings and images.)

Within this framework, an online workshop was also held and led by Michael Schwab, editor of the Journal for Artistic Research, deepening artistic research methodologies and fostering dialogue between members of the OSSO collective, researchers from LIDA (ESAD.CR), and MA Fine Arts students.

Body, Gesture and Place. Notes on Luminescence.

Transatlantic actions between Portugal-Brazil

This collaborative project was developed between ICSEZ/UFAM (Brazil), through the Amazonian Visualities Research Group (VIA/CNPq), the BA in Fine Arts – Performance and Visuality course (ESAD.CR), and LiDA.

Between February and June 2022, three joint classes were held via videoconference, involving students of Performance (ESAD.CR), Photography, and Cinema (Amazonas, Parintins). The project fostered an intercultural exchange of pedagogical and artistic practices, positioning the body as the protagonist of the learning experience.

One open-classe ate ESAD.CR, one publications, and Collaborative classes conducted via Zoom, were developed, including three participations in Seminars, such as Universidade Federal da Paraíba and at the III International Congress of Digital Citizenship (Conciddig 2022).

Artistic Residency Subtle-Body at CCAC and CAAA

Between 2022 and 2025, I realized an artistic residency named Subtle-Body in collaboration with the Centro de Arte Alberto Carneiro and the Centro para os Assuntos da Arte e Arquitetura. For the artist the subtle body is a concept encompasses physical, mental, and indefinable dimensions that move between artwork and spectator (Carneiro, 2013) 

The artistic works were developed closely intertwined with the experience of silence, through a four-day retreat at Casa da Torre, Braga. Developed during this time focus on the concept of the subtle body, a conceptual field present in the extensive pedagogical and artistic oeuvre of Alberto Carneiro. Through direct contact with the artist’s sculptures and writings, articulated with performative practice and contemplation, several questions emerged: What resources does my body require to activate more subtle levels of relationship with objects? What kinds of subtle encounters become possible? The possibility of touching Alberto’s sculptures, approached with caution and in coherence with the artist’s vision of experiencing his works through physical proximity, I created a series of frottages derived from the movement of my body through space and from the gesture of touching “A Oriente na Floresta de Ise-Shima” (1996/1997) sculpture. The frottages were simultaneously, related to the silent retreat drawings and later transformed into screen prints, translating tactile experience into visual form.

Meanwhile, at CAAA, (place I was staying for sleep) I developed a performance, filmed, in close connection with the BBC documentary “The Private Life of the Starling” by Jeffery Boswall (1979) The performance is a poetic walk in stage: while the documentary is projected, I move toward and away from its images across the stage. Through this interaction, gesture became a medium for exploring relational and subtle experience, translating the aerial choreography of the starlings into a sensorial and improvisation performance.

Artistic Residency Notations on the Gestures of a Praying Body (July 24–29, 2025)

João Farelo and Teresa Luzio Morais

The residency involved immersion in the daily life of the Betlehem sisters, through shared moments of liturgical prayer in the chapel, shared with the artist João Farelo. The particularity of the site, the Monastery of Nossa Senhora do Rosário (Vale Côvo), calls for an inner silence, essential both for prayer and for artistic creation.

The bodies of the sisters, dressed in white—sometimes like trunks, sometimes like rocks—lift prayers as acts of invocation and adoration to God. By allowing ourselves to be traversed by their voices and gestures, multiple experiences overlap and are revealed. It becomes clear that the silence emerging from the chants opens us to something deeply human within ourselves: the dimension of the body. The sisters’ liturgical rituals, the grace of the place, and the beginning of a collective process of research and artistic creation remain with those who carry the first breath of this inhabited silence.

Notations on the Gestures of a Praying Body is the title that announces a set of practices in listening, drawing, movement, and writing—cultivated over five days at the Monastery of Nossa Senhora do Rosário—and which will unfold into further moments of prayer and creation, later to be announced.

An output of this Residency is a self-published book named Dream Diary inspired by the Ignatian method and by the experience of accompanying my father’s passage into a state of unconsciousness. Twelve sentences gave rise to twelve choreographic movements — ways of investigating mourning through stillness, drawing, and prayer.  The artist book was presented at the PSI #30 conference in Fortaleza (2025).

Group studies subtle-body

From the artistic and pedagogical research, a collective space for ongoing research now emerges. The group proposes a platform for collective inquiry into the body in its subtle and relational dimensions within contemporary artistic practices. The work articulates poetic, philosophical, and artistic readings with practical movement experiences as devices for research and creation. It adopts a multidisciplinary and non-hegemonic approach to knowledge, valuing time for listening, vulnerability, and risk as modes of producing knowledge. Processes are shared, open, and evolving, with members proposing and promoting works that arise from the encounters. In this way, the project Subtle Body remains active as a community of research and artistic practice.

Acaso, María (2009). La educación artística no son manualidades. Madrid: UCM.

Barcelos, Valdo (2008). Educação Ambiental Sobre Princípios, metodologias e atitudes. Petrópolis: Editora Vozes.

Garoian, Charles R. (1999). Performing Pedagogy: Toward An Art Of Politics. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Hillesum, Etty (2020). Diário 1941-1943. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim.

Irwin, Rita L. (2017). A/r/tography as Practice-Based Research. UK: Routledge.

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2018). Construindo as Epistemologias do Sul Para um pensamento alternativo de alternativas Volume I. Buenos Aires: CLACSO.

Walsh, Catherine E. (2023). Rising Up. Living On. Re-Existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks. Durham and London: Duke University Press.