PEX – Lab2PT Internal Exploratory Projects

 

Project Textile Territory, Resistance, Agency, Materiality and Ancestry | T2RAMA

The creation of internal exploratory projects is a key strategy for strengthening the Lab2PT team. The formation of interdisciplinary teams is crucial for developing and establishing research networks that promote the internationalisation of knowledge production, the exploration of new avenues of research and the strengthening of applications for competitive funding. Fostering such teams is therefore fundamental to cementing interdisciplinary research practices that bring together coordinated teams of senior and junior researchers, whilst attracting Master’s and PhD students. The aim is to create prospects for sustainability and to enhance scientific employment policy through the opportunities available for attracting and recruiting researchers of excellence.
Exploratory funding is awarded annually to proposals aimed at exploring new avenues of research or consolidating those already underway, with the specific aim of strengthening transdisciplinary approaches.

In the 2025–2026 round, six Exploratory Projects were approved.

 

Today we present the Project Textile Territory, Resistance, Agency, Materiality and Ancestry | T2RAMA

 

Scientific Areas: Design, Visual Arts, History
PI: Bernardo Providência
Team: Mónica Faria, Natacha Antão Moutinho, Joana Sequeira, Isabel Fernandes and Cristina Parente (ISUP – Institute of Sociology, University of Porto), Germannya D’ Garcia Araujo Silva (Federal University of Pernambuco, O Imaginário Design Laboratory), Joana Cunha (2C2T – Centre for Textile Science and Technology, University of Minho) with the Capuchin nuns of the Montemuro Mountains and Helena Cardoso (estate)
Project duration: 15 September 2026 to 14 September 2027

 

The T2RAMA project proposes a transdisciplinary investigation centered on the territory as a living system of relationships between knowledge and practices, interacting on subjects within a particular context of forms of social organization. Starting from the recognition of tacit knowledge present in local contexts, the project seeks to develop a prototype of a transdisciplinary analytical structure capable of articulating academic, technical, empirical, and vernacular contributions in a relational reading of the territory and its heritage.

 

The collection of textile designer Helena Cardoso constitutes the experimental field of the research, allowing the proposed structure to be tested through the collaborative work of researchers from different areas. The approach focuses both on the transition between tradition and contemporaneity and on the forms of social production of knowledge.

The integration of an artistic component into the research team is crucial to giving the project a sensitive, critical, and performative dimension. This artistic practice plays a fundamental role in activating the collection as a relational device, promoting the poetic documentation of the disciplinary tensions inherent in the study and fostering the co-creation of visual narratives with the local community – a process exemplified in an exemplary way by the artistic residency carried out with the Capuchin nuns of Serra de Montemuro.

 

The project aims to produce a replicable model, a systematized database of the collection, and new methodologies for collaborative work, contributing to a renewed reflection on territory, memory, and materiality, taking into account both the local context and the forms of social organization that it constructs or fosters.