In this joint event co-organized with the Nordic Drawing School (DNS), our colleagues from the University of Porto will present their artistic research on drawing, in relation to concepts that are central for cognitive semiotics like narrative, resonance, and embodiment! The presentations will be two, ca. 30 minutes each, followed by a general discussion. We invite everyone to this event, which we will hold only "in real life", to facilitate interactions! After that, there will be a dinner at Valvet, for which you would need to sign up by May 4 by sending an email to Jordan.

Drawing Resonance, Júlio Dolbeth

This presentation looks at drawing as a practice grounded in proximity and attention. It brings together a selection of works developed across my personal projects and commissioned contexts, focusing on the body as both subject and starting point. Many of the drawings come from informal situations, often in the company of others. Portraits are made without preparation, as immediate responses to what is seen, heard or remembered. Drawing becomes a way of listening, registering gestures, expressions and the space between bodies. Each image carries a small narrative. These fragments remain open, moving between observation and fiction. The work shifts between authorial and commissioned contexts, negotiating different conditions while maintaining a consistent approach to drawing. Resonance here refers to how images take shape through contact with people, situations and time. Drawing holds these encounters not as fixed representations, but as traces formed through attention and proximity.

CHÃ — Drawing as a Place of Resistance, Silvia Simões

In this presentation, CHÃ — Drawing as a Place of Resistance, I reflect on drawing as a space of resistance, sensitivity, and critical imagination. Grounded in my artistic practice, the presentation examines how drawing can respond to contemporary challenges by opening up alternative ways of seeing, sensing, and imagining. Drawing on my experience in Chã das Caldeiras, on the island of Fogo, Cape Verde, I consider how encounters with territory, landscape, and displacement have shaped my work. My return to Fogo after the 2014 volcanic eruption confronted me with a radically transformed landscape, in which destruction, memory, and resilience became central to my artistic reflection. Faced with a place that no longer corresponded to my earlier visual memories, drawing emerged as a way of engaging with violence, loss, and the instability of perception.

The presentation approaches drawing not simply as a representational tool, but as an embodied and material practice through which gesture, surface, erasure, and repetition become ways of responding to the forces of the landscape. In dialogue with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, I discuss how drawing can register the relationship between body and place, combining haptic and visual experience in order to bear witness to spatial violence while also opening the possibility of other imagined images. At its core, this presentation proposes drawing as a site of resistance: a practice through which the body persists, remembers, and reimagines in the face of rupture.