Between field and archive: situated research processes

Curator: Beatriz Duarte
Location: Escola Superior Artística do Porto (Porto, Portugal)
June 25, 2026 - June 30, 2026

curating exhibiting; researching

Between Field and Archive: Situated Research Processes was an exhibition presenting working processes from the doctoral research Resignifying Contemporary Heritages: Strategies of Situated Curating and Artistic Mediation of Fragments of Recent Pasts, developed within the PhD in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.

The exhibition brought together encounters, materials and practices that shaped a mode of research grounded in fieldwork and developed in collaboration with places, people, plants and archives. The research approached contemporary heritage through three interconnected dimensions: the material and archaeological, attentive to ruins, residues and ruderal vegetation; the affective, concerned with embodied and phenomenological experiences of place; and the ethical, extending care and responsibility to multispecies relations. Its central method was situated curating, understood both as researching places as matter, archive and problem, and as producing knowledge from within them. Walking, photographing, mapping and writing thus became practices of knowledge and care.

These ideas were explored across several sites. At Monte do Ovil, official archaeology was placed in dialogue with artistic and embodied approaches. At the former military batteries of the Barron Plan, the research examined how military histories are fragmented and reinterpreted through musealisation, appropriation and renewed public use. In Freixo, a post-industrial area of Porto, critical mapping was used to make dispersed inheritances visible and to challenge dominant urban planning narratives.

The former Arquinho textile factory became the central site of the research. Now being transformed into an aerospace research centre, the building holds institutional documents and memories, alongside dust, ruins and vegetation. Through artistic field encounters, workshops and entropoetic writing, the research developed a speculative archive operating within the gaps of formal archives.

Between Field and Archive brought together fieldwork photographs, artworks, essays, documents, maps and fragments of the thesis. These materials formed a process-based archive of both the research and the places investigated, inviting visitors to engage with their traces, absences and transformations.

Fotos de Beatriz Duarte e Ojima