Visões Úteis

reAGent

In 2009, when it opened its Education Service, Visões Úteis invoked an acute awareness of our responsibility, not only as artists but also as a structure supported financially by the State. As artists because to the critical gesture in which artistic creation was expressed daily, we imposed not only an aesthetic but also a political responsibility. As a structure supported financially by the State because every day we remembered the effort made by the taxpayers and the trust placed in us to pursue eminently public goods.

For this reason, since that year, the aesthetic project of Visões Úteis started to articulate itself, with an Education Service that broadened and strengthened ties with the surrounding community (s). A space where the working methodologies of the performing arts could also be tools for reflection and autonomy for the population in general, and in particular for all those who lived in the peripheries, be they of geography, gender, generation, culture or ethnicity.

And because it was an Education Service in the wake of others - on a larger scale and almost always associated with programming entities - this line of activity was organized by courses, in an eminently academic logic, in which priorities and access modes were defined for the urgency of the actions: First the seniors of our neighborhood and our parish, with a Community Performance Course; Then the initiation of theater for young people and adults, through 3 annual courses; and finally, a diffuse plurality of initiatives that could either focus on the need for knowledge sharing between artists, or on boosting their professional activity, or on the individual response to urgent calls from partners (working with prisoners or emigrants).

But over the next decade, the division between the nuclear artistic project, and the aspect described here, was slowly disappearing due to various factors:

Insertion in an Erasmus + learning partnership, about performing arts in times of crisis (PACE, 2011-2013)

The integration of participants of the Education Service in nuclear creations (Corpo Casa Rua, 2013).

The sharing of creative processes with Anthropologists and the (re) affective approach to Porto’s area of Campanhã (Locus Logro, 2016).

The creation of a large-scale community project, in Campanhã and within the scope of the Creative Europe Program (Reclaim the Future, 2016-2018).

The investigation of the application of the arts to the therapy of Asperger's Syndrome, through successive workshops (Oficinas Criativas, 2015/2016, 2020).

The promotion of a nuclear creation over three years with the same group of students in the third cycle of basic education. (Validade, 2018-2020)

Integration in a Pláka Collective of the Porto City Council, to generate reflection about artistic practices (Politics of Survival, 2018)

And finally - but not to end, we hope - the acceptance of the role of (re) agents for promoting the Culture in Expansion program of the Porto City Council, in Campanhã (since 2019)

And perhaps because we were so absorbed with all this, it was only at the end of 2019 that we noticed that our beloved and former Education Service was now only the small part of an immense axis of activities, which at all times unfolds and interferes with nuclear creations. , to the point that it is sometimes difficult to understand where one thing begins and ends another (although at Visões Úteis, and with annual regularity, develop at least one creative process in which the product does not escape much from the logic of presenting a show)

Thus, and to guarantee space for reflection on this particular axis, at the end of 2019 we “closed” our Education Service, continuing the activities that characterized it, taking place in the broader scope of this reAGent, where, above all, thinking and activities that force the expansion of our artistic practices to meet other social practices, to meet other terms of sharing the sensitive.

The coordination of reAGent is by Ana Vitorino, Carlos Costa, Inês de Carvalho.

The Resident Monitor is Ana Azevedo.

And we have the smallest Board of Trustees in the world, with Jorge Palinhos.

We want to be with you.