Paula Caspão in residency at Espaço Alkantara

Mouths Full is the name of a hallucinatory investigation, a practice of audio-video-textual remediation with no remedy. It rehearses practices of critical cine-fabulation to interrogate the prevailing epistemologies we inhabit – the ways of reading, writing and (re)encountering knowledge, of acknowledging and unknowing, of telling and untelling (hi)stories – while at the same time attempting to imagine nonextractivist ways of accounting for and of dispossessing the act of knowing. A derivative product of a phantasmagorical reading practice that has been unfinishing itself with others since 2019, Mouths Full assembles the readings that have kept me company within the dialogue knitted between two research projects: Expanded Practices All Over [Paula Caspão, CET-FLUL, 2019–2025] and Institute of Rest(s) [Alix Eynaudi, Manufacture de Lausanne – Haute École des Arts de la Scène, 2023–2025].

Rummaging across archives of many kinds, Mouths Full seeks to document unusual practices of visualising, perceiving and referencing, (a)notating and (re)citing, as well as ways of reading, writing, translating, enunciating and pronouncing collectively. Among other things that constantly escape our grasp, this never-ending investigation addresses what it means to find ourselves “planted here” [plantées là] and to operate from within our languages, tongues and manners of speaking; from our ways of seeing, reviewing and unseeing; from the (hi)stories we have incorporated and resonate recursively across fields – of vision, of cotton, of knowledge, of corn, of protest, of joy, of sugar, of constraint, of complicity. Amidst multiple accidents along the way, Mouths Full revisits the convoluted landscapes of epistemic and socio-political complicities between the genealogy of modern liberalism – as a project of colonial divisions of humanity – and the current ‘society of knowledge’, which is also the society of (self-)performance and global computation/control.


— Paula Caspão

Bio

Paula Caspão lives and works between Lisbon and Paris, in critical indeterminacy between forms of theoretical research, transversal artistic practices and socio-political thinking. She has worked extensively on the economies and infrastructures of research, on the modes of producing knowledge and their specific sensoria, addressing the infra-ordinary dimensions of reading, translation and editing. She is currently rehearsing cine-fabulation practices to interrogate the forms of extractivism and socio-environmental devastation implicated in the production of knowledge and of History, as well as in the maintenance of its institutions, technologies and political fictions.

She is a full member of the Centre for Theatre Studies (CET-FLUL), associate researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History (IHC-UNL), and Assistant Professor in Artistic Studies / PhD and MA Programme in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Lisbon. She holds a PhD in philosophy (epistemology and aesthetics) at the University of Paris Ouest Nanterre (2010) and was a visiting scholar at the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University (2018).