Surfaces – Conditions of Appearing: Making and Surfacing is the second edition of an interdisciplinary meeting jointly organized by iA* (Research in the Arts) and PRAXIS of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Beira Interior and, starting with this edition, by lab2pt and the School of Architecture, Art and Design at the University of Minho.

As in the first edition, our purpose remains to promote a transversal, interdisciplinary approach that fosters reflection emerging from the shared spaces of knowledge and experience we bring. These may stem from philosophy, architecture, design, music, mathematics, engineering, the arts, or other fields, as well as the intersectional spaces between them.

Conditions of Appearing: Making and Surfacing

The contemporary urgency to manifest and illuminate what lies on the surface neglects the depth of the processes and mediations that sustain it. The immediacy of the ready-made has become universalized, yet it relies on obscuring the act of making; it demands the fiction of the "already made" while subordinating media, resources, and materials, which are treated as merely incidental. A superficialization of surfaces themselves takes place: they are torn from their own depth, leaving us with an experience that turns its back on what constitutes their very body.

Therefore, it is essential to question the conditions of appearing. These are mediations, narratives, and materialities whose meaning and experience must be entered into—as if we were bringing the surface to the depths, as if we were bringing it to light, but reversing the direction of the movement, from the outside in.

In Portuguese, aflorar (to surface or outcrop) is a beautiful way of saying that something comes to the Earth's surface. Rocky outcrops occur when veins and seams from the deep emerge exposed on the earthen surface. There is also the "surfacing" of subjects, raising them so that truth might eventually surface as well—a revealing and a happening condensed in the etymological idea of something blooming into a flower (vir a ser flor). Something metamorphoses to give rise to a flower, its petals becoming a slender surface of the world.

In this second meeting on surfaces, the challenge is to surface the conditions of this surfacing. We want to trace back to the genesis of what offers itself to be experienced legibly and meaningfully, plunging into the depth of fundamental binaries:

• Material / Immaterial

• Scientific / Artistic

• Visible / Invisible

• Technical / Symbolic

Organization:

• André Barata | PRAXIS / UBI

• Andreia Garcia | lab2pt – EAAD / UM

• Sara Velez | iArtes* / UBI

• Susana Gaudêncio | lab2pt – EAAD / UM

Design: Sara Constante