International Encounter Presence, Absence, Invisibility, 10 – 14 OCTOBER 2022, Lisbon.
12 october | Alva Noe | Achieving each other: enacting values; making presence
13 october | Heiner Goebbels | On the Omni-Presence of Music
14 october | Patrícia Portela | The summons of absence
Full program here.
Alva Noë is a writer and a philosopher living in Berkeley and New York. He works on the nature of mind and human experience. He is the author of Action in Perception (MIT Press, 2004); Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2009); Varieties of Presence (Harvard University Press, 2012); Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2015); and Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (Oxford University Press, 2019). . His latest book is Learning To Look: Dispatches from the Art World (Oxford, 2022).
Alva received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1995 and is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media. He previously was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has been philosopher-in-residence with The Forsythe Company and has also collaborated creatively with dance artists Deborah Hay, Nicole Peisl, Jess Curtis, Claire Cunningham, Katye Coe, and Charlie Morrissey. Alva is a 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. He is a 2018 recipient of the Judd/Hume Prize in Advanced Visual Studies. He was a weekly contributor to National Public Radio’s now defunct science blog 13.7: Cosmos and Culture. Until 2025 Alva is an Einstein Visiting Fellow at the Free University in Berlin, where is the director of the Reorganizing Ourselves research group.
The composer and director Heiner Goebbels (*1952) belongs to the most important exponents of the contemporary music and theatre scene. His compositions for ensembles and big orchestras are currently performed worldwide as well as several of his music theatre works and staged concerts. He created a great variety of sound and video installations, which have been displayed by Artangel London, MAC Lyon, Museum Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Albertinum Dresden, New Space Moscow, Museo da Arte Bogota a.o..
Heiner Goebbels worked for nearly 20 years as a professor at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of the Justus Liebig University in Giessen (1999-2018), from 2012 to 2014 he was artistic director of the International Festival of the Arts RUHRTRIENNALE.2018 he received the first appointment for the newly established Georg Büchner Professorship, from the President of the Justus Liebig University and is established at the interdisciplinary research centre ZMI – Centre for Media and Interactivity in Gießen.
Upcoming performances can be seen in the Calender.
Patrícia Portela is a performance maker and writer born in 1974, living between Belgium and Portugal. She has a BA in Stage Set and Costume Design (ESTC), a MA in Scenography and Dramaturgy of Space (University of Utrecht and Saint Martins College of Art, Antwerp), a post-graduation in Theatricality and Performativity (APT, Antwerp), a traineeship at the European Film School (Ebeltoft, Denmark) and a MA in Philosophy (University of Leuven, Belgium). Since 2003 she has worked on her own performances and installations in collaboration with international artists. She has achieved national and international recognition for her unusual work, interweaving daring approaches to technology and individuals mediation and is considered one of the most innovative artists of her generation. She won the Revelation Prize in 1994 for her creative work in performance and cinema, the Prize Teatro na Década for T5 in 1999, the Gulbenkian Foundation Prize Madalena de Azeredo Perdigão for the performance Flatland I in 2004 and was one of the 5 finalists of the Sonae Media Art Prize 2015 with her installation Parasomnia, amongst other prizes. She has been invited to participate in the prestigious International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa in 2013 and to be the first Outreach Fellow. She was the first literary resident in Berlin in 2016, sponsored by the Portuguese Embassy in Germany/Instituto Camões. She lectures on dramaturgy, space and image regularly at Universities and cultural centers in Portugal (such as University of Minho or University of Lisbon) and abroad (University of Antwerp, Escola de Escrita in Curitiba, etc).
