How can we study and preserve ephemeral cultural manifestations, such as an experimental theatre piece, a performance or dance work?
This is the challenge that the project RESONANCE — Epistemologies for the Documentation of Affect and Becoming in Cultural Manifestations in Performance (1969-1979) seeks to embrace and pursue.
The aim of RESONANCE is to analyse cultural manifestations in performance created under the auspices of specific chronological and geographical contingencies, which we consider as being expanded and continuously expanding. We seek to analyse chronology as a dilated category: at times self-containing, but still consistently resonating across timescapes. Interrogating the politics of memory across temporal, national, and affective landscapes, RESONANCE’s starting point is set on the crest of museal practices seeking to acquire and conserve these pieces: the apparent ontological dichotomy between performance-based art – conceived around their disappearance as well as unrepeatability – and the performing arts – understood as inherently iterative. The project mobilises these dichotomies into novel forms of dialectical engagement, proposing a new framework, based on transmission and resonance, necessarily unsettle such ontological formulations.
By analysing their spatio-temporal resonances through the concept of affective landscape, they mobilise discussions regarding transmission away from representation and reproducibility and towards memory, embodiment, or affect.
With this goal in mind, RESONANCE will analyse the ways in which performance-based cultural manifestations, such as the music theatre pieces Mise-en-Requiem (1979) and Double (1982) by Constança Capdeville, or the pioneering performance of the New Portuguese Dance Zoo&Lógica (1984) by Paula Massano, echo across distinctive temporalities. We will explore how these and other works produced during the decade preceding and coinciding with the Carnation Revolution of 1974 (1969-1979), were (and can be) re-enacted, documented, and remembered.
In this sense, we are grounded on the seventies as a paradigm that simultaneously collapses and erupts forms of memory and memorialisation – some of which we can still experience today. With RESONANCE, we are tracing the effervescent cultural waves that led to and prolonged the revolutionary subjectivity in Portugal, while affirming kinship with other cultural movements beyond geographical borders.
In this context, we will propose new epistemological frameworks and methodologies for the conservation of such works. Understood as a set of cultural, emotional, social, and technological apparatus and dynamics, the affective landscape provides a framework for addressing a gap in the state of the art concerning the conservation, archiving, documentation, and memorialisation of performances deemed time- and/or site-specific, particularly those created in Portugal during the 1960s and 1970s, and the ways in which they reverberate in later decades. Informed by and in response to affect theory, RESONANCE will propose both an epistemological framework and a set of methodologies to inscribe the memories and a/effectively and affirmatively materialise such performances.
This epistemological inquiry departs from the typical research milieu of conservation — the institution of the museum — to devise where those performance practices, as practices in performance, stand: the intra-agential relational network of grassroots organisations, community organisers, activist groups, individual artists and their own ecologies. This ecological approach to the conservation of these cultural manifestations considers affect as the mesh that intra-connects these works, the actors that participate therein, and the various relationships that are created, or, we could say, that resonate across temporal moments. Here, we turn to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari not only to validate this approach, but also to underline the methodological vocabulary of RESONANCE: we consider these artistic manifestations as being “in process”, or “becoming”, as Deleuze and Guattari have called them; our goal is to propose new methods that recognise non-inscriptional knowledge.
This theory-informed and politically-committed epistemological investigation will lead to conceptual frameworks, methodological approaches, and policy recommendations.
Theoretical frameworks will allow for the development of a new critical vocabulary for these memory practices as well as a redefinition of analytical stances. New methodologies will consist of significance assessments, stakeholder identification tools, and qualitative methodologies to produce and analyse documentation, addressing all three areas pertaining to the preservation of these works: archiving and cataloguing, conservation and re-enactment, and historical analysis and formal critique.
These approaches will entangle with policy through particular changes specifically to cataloguing. This methodological shift also requires reconsidering what is understood as the object of conservation: not simply a bounded work to be stabilised through documentation, but the relational conditions through which performance-based manifestations can continue to be remembered, reactivated, transformed, and made meaningful.
How to cite this resource: RESONANCE project team (2026). “About the RESONANCE project” in RESONANCE: Epistemologies for the Documentation of Affect and Becoming in Cultural Manifestations in Performance (1969-1979). Available at https://resonance.fcsh.unl.pt/about-the-project/ 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)