Live Art Writers Network at DDD 2025 – Commissions
Since 2024, the Live Art Writers’ Network (LAWN) has been collectively exploring and nurturing experimental writing practices that unfold in dialogue with and in response to performance and live art, as well as the many contexts of where it happens. Responding to the invitation by DDD – Festival Dias da Dança 2025 in Porto (Portugal), working in relation to a big institution and in dialogue with artists on the ground, we worked alongside a long history of collaboration and tensions between local communities and the institutions that hold power over the city’s cultural apparatus. As a project that looks to seed creative/critical responses to performance, we inhabited this invitation with the same curiosity: What would it mean to inhabit an international festival and its host city, whilst also sitting with the knots, tensions and problematics of a government run arts organisation and its relationship to local arts ecologies?
Spread across established venues in the Portuguese northern city, DDD Festival’s ninth edition tapped into venues that are strongholds of community and artistic development, including CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva and CRL – Central Eléctrica, as well as the main venue that sits both at the centre of its programming and of the city itself – Teatro Municipal do Porto – Rivoli. Primarily focused on contemporary languages around dance and performance, the festival has also traditionally hosted a vast programme of commissioned writing and public discussions in dialogue with and in response to performance. Alongside this, there is still a long-standing tradition of writing in response to artistic and reflective forms across the Portuguese cultural sector, from the pioneering Citemor Festival blog, to contemporary publications such as Coreia and Mnemónica, as well as a vast array self-publishing in multimedia formats by artists and collectives, and from structures such as MEXEZINE, Alkantara Festival, BoCA and CoffeePaste.
From this starting point, in collaboration with the programming team and with our Portugal-based LAWN collaborators Claudia Galhós, Paulo Pinto and Dori Nigro, we developed a programme with the intention of tapping into this rich history of the festival and the local communities where it is temporarily rooted, year on year. This included a series of intimate gatherings with invited artists and collaborators including Performing The Archive, a Porto based research project and residency space, as well as a participatory conversation focused on the history and form of creative and critical responses to performance, the archive as a space for critical thinking and how narrative building and writing, can be co-opted by institutions for their own interests.
As is usual with LAWN’s ethos, our focus was on platforming writers and artists whose work is shaped by lived experiences of intersectional borders. To accompany the festival and its live events (including performances, workshops and talks), we invited artists with a long history of living in and working in Porto, and whose voices are vital for our understanding of what the written text can be: AURA, whose commission explores direct and intimate responses via hand-written personal letters; Odete, who explores critical writing through fiction in a meta exploration of the form as both a witness and holder of archive; Pedro Vilela who accompanies performances through reflections and thinks through the politics of programming against a backdrop of the city’s own context, with a proposal for future editions. Accompanied by mentorship by Claudia Galhós, Dori Nigro and Paulo Pinto, the commissions present a wide-range of intimate, urgent and explorative writing, which you can find below.
Alongside these works, we were in residency for two weeks in Studio 1 at CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva, a studio and artistic residencies building that proposes to be a gathering space for both the local and the international performance community. There we held an open-door studio space set up where artists, thinkers and others taking part in the festival could gather, write, think, visit a small reference library, meet and hold conversations about performance practices, writing and the festival itself.
LAWN has been thought of as a laboratory to think through the role of criticality and allyship within performance contexts. Opening up spaces to discuss this with other practitioners, is a key part of how the project moves and grows, so during our residency we hosted a laboratory-conversation with invited writers and artists to reflect on critical writing in their practices and the role of the ‘critic’ within ecologies of the arts sector we inhabit. We discussed the impact writing can have on economies of attention, the efficacy of critical writing and the possibilities of its failure, we problematised the notion of power and the critic’s role in maintaining it, reflecting on what it means to make explicit the writers’ positionality, writing as a communal practice, and the use of fiction within criticism, amongst other conversations. The laboratory was an open experiment, led by Claudia Galhós and we hope to return to it in the near future, giving further space to these conversations.
This programme, we hope, is an intention to kick start provocations about festival programming, contextualisation and community, artistic process and also what the potentialities of the writing form can be.
Live Art Writers Network at DDD 2025 is a co-production between performingborders and DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, in partnership with CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva.
Cuidemos da floresta | Pedro Vilela (Português)
Let us cultivate the forest | Pedro Vilela (English)
Image: Vagabundus by Ídio Chichav, João Octávio Peixoto / DDD
O olhar falha | Odete (Português)
The failing gaze | Odete (English)
Image: Odete, by Xipipa
Carta aberta num contexto em que a dança e o pensamento crítico cruzam-se afetivamente | Aura (Português)
Open letter in a context in which dance and critical thinking intersect affectively | Aura (English)
Image: Courtesy of Aura
Pedro Vilela is an artist-curator-researcher. Currently pursuing a PhD in Art Education at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, he is also developing TREMA!, an association that artistically connects Brazil and Portugal, and collaborates with various organizations in the city of Porto. His main interest lies in the Afro-Latin American scene, engaging with themes such as decoloniality and frameworks of racialization. He is also the first Latin American to receive the Magaly Muguercia Fellowship, awarded by the Iberescena Program. pedro-vilela.com
Odete works between performance, text, visual arts and music. Her work is obsessed with historiographical writing, using erotics and paranoia as two somatic ways of relating to the archival materials. She writes through her body, speculating biographies of historical characters through epidermic pleasures: fashion, personality, presence, fragrance, grace, sensibility. She claims to be a bastard daughter of Lucifer, descending from the medieval practice of satanic pacts to alter one’s gendered body. Lately she has been researching and working around building connection points between “effeminate” histories, from the baroque Castrati to the 19th century dandies. odete.pt
AURA (1997, Porto) is a transdisciplinary artist interested in identity and sustainability issues and co-founder of Asterisco, a space and platform for underrepresented artists. Her work was presented at The Place, Nottingham Contemporary, Centre for Live Art Yorkshire, Stockholm Fringe Festival, Municipal Theatre of Porto, Municipal Galleries of Lisbon, Mala Voadora, Rua das Gaivotas 6, Maia Contemporary Art Biennial, among others. Holds a MA in Performance Making by Goldsmiths and a BA in Fine Arts and Intermedia by ESAP and Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk. auradafonseca.com
These commissions are included in Pamphlet #8, see here.
Live Art Writers Network at DDD 2025 is a co-production between performingborders and DDD – Festival Dias da Dança, in partnership with CAMPUS Paulo Cunha e Silva. Additional support from Necessity Fund.
Lead Image courtesy of Aura.
