This research stream proposes to traverse the theoretical landscapes that the project inhabits.
Although we use genealogy as a critical method qua Foucault’s definition in Discipline and Punish: The birth of the prison — as a cartography of power relations —1, this research stream also hopes to unsettle the docility of these techno-colonial projects of abstractioning. Here, cartography emerges as both a diagrammatic and programmatic proposition: it allows us to think through the theoretical geographies which the interdisciplinary team of the RESONANCE project is adopting and cross-linking, and the ways in which they relate to each other, while making visible the conceptual underbelly of the project and the effects of its metabolising machine.
In this sense, we are recognising the project as a Latourian “centre of calculations:” a site through which often-dispersed information and sedimented and emergent processes of infrastructuralisation are assembled, mediated, and reproduced across historical and contemporary temporalities2. Albeit time-specific, this project also participates in the production and reproduction of those infrastructures through its calculations, which include the ways in which we are ourselves adopting and digesting the theoretical underpinnings of our work. This research stream therefore also emerges as our contribution to an ethics of accountability.
The RESONANCE project aims to explore the ways in which the affective atmospheres of the Portuguese 1974 Carnation Revolution, as well as the years predating and immediately following it complicate the documentation, transmission, and historicisation of performance-based works created at the time. With these goals in mind, the project team is invested in two conceptual fields: affect theory and posthumanism.3
Affect theory allows us to tap into the non-representational and the ways in which affect emerges in, between and across bodies, individual and collective, which has consequences on the required analytical methodologies.4 The concept of affect has often been considered problematic, given the multiple meanings it can assume and the difficulty in isolating it completely from other terms such as emotion or feeling.
In a Spinozist sense, as advocated by Deleuze — whose philosophy has inspired a significant body of research on affects as forces and intensities that elude us — affects perform a capacity of the body: its potency of action, which diminishes or increases upon encountering other more-than-human bodies. Affects are a mode of affecting and being affected continuously transforming bodies, as a crux where biological and neurological processes, social and cultural norms and values, information networks, economic systems and political ideologies intersect. The body, as a mediator of experience, is traversed by these forces, hence, the approach to such experience requires an engagement with biological, social and cultural materialities, as feminist, queer and postcolonial approaches have demonstrated.5
In the case of performance documentation and historicisation leaning into affect theory, it necessarily implies an epistemological overhaul consequential in terms of museum documentation methodologies and policy.
Mobilising modes of transmitting performance-based works from the codified to the affective also reshapes the ways in which the subaltern is ultimately rehearsed. Whose stories have we been telling? Who and what has been forgotten? And how might we trace the histories of performances created over this period in ways that speak to the transnational, transtemporal, and transmedial?
Posthumanisms – and especially those stemming from feminist new materialisms – can help proposing new architectures of relation. Threading posthumanism with the project’s goals, we can envisage a turn towards a centring of the performative embodiment of humans and more-than-humans vis-à-vis what Karen Barad calls a “posthumanist performativity,”6 thus highlighting the hidden historical abodes of performance-based works.
Similarly, if attending to the materiality of works made in 1970s Portugal opens up ways of unsettling the Goodmanian dichotomy (see Intersecting analytical dichotomies), thinking through them through feminist posthumanisms – a theoretical world committed to abolishing categorical operations -, which helps further unpack these binaries. And finally, reading-together-apart these histories of performance can also help us connect heterogeneous strata across national, temporal, and media boundaries.7
All members of the research team are involved in this research stream.
How to cite this resource: RESONANCE project team (2026). “About the RESONANCE project: Research Streams,” in RESONANCE: Epistemologies for the Documentation of Affect and Becoming in Cultural Manifestations in Performance (1969-1979). Available at https://resonance.fcsh.unl.pt/research-streams/cartographing-theoretical-geographies/Contributions (by alphabetic order of last name): First draft write-up: Ana Bigotte Vieira, Hélia Marçal, Ana Pais Review and final draft write-up: Ana Bigotte Vieira, Afonso Dias Ramos, Joana Lia Ferreira, Rita Macedo, Filipa Magalhães, Hélia Marçal, Ana Pais; Last review: 16 October 2026
The content on this website is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license. This means anyone can use this information with appropriate attribution. Under this license, attribution includes giving appropriate credit, providing a link to the license (see above), and indicating whether changes were made. The RESONANCE project is supported by the Programa Regional Lisboa 2030, Portugal 2030 and the European Union (LISBOA2030-FEDER-00914500). This work is also co-funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the references 2023.17624.ICDT (https://doi.org/10.54499/2023.17624.ICDT). In addition, this work is funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, FCT, I.P., under the FCT-Tenure programme 2023.11076.TENURE.147, 2023.11076.TENURE.195, 2023.11076.TENURE.193, and in the context of the Concurso Estímulo ao Emprego Científico Individual, with the reference 10.54499/2022.03775.CEECIND/CP1725/CT0045. The research centres associated to this project are funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, FCT, I.P.: UID/00417/2025 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00417/2025), UID/00693/2025 (https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00693/2025), and LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI 10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020). IHA, IHC, CESEM, ICNOVA, and IFILNOVA are funded by national funds through FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P., under the projects UID/00417/2025 (DO: doi.org/10.54499/UID/00417/2025), UID/04209/2025 (DOI: https///doi.org/10.54499/uID/04209/2025). UID/00693/2025 (DOl: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00693/2025), UID/05021/2025 (DOl: https//doi.org/10.54499/UID/05021/2025), UID/00183/2025 (DO: https://doi.org/10.54499/UID/00183/2025), ond LA/P/0132/2020 (DOI: doi.org/10.54499/LA/P/0132/2020)