Choreographer and curator Mário Lopes first had the idea of collaborating with curator Diane Lima in 2016, when he joined the Afro-T immersion group, a project started by Lima in 2015. Lopes, who as one of the creators of Plataforma Plus had been staging residencies and artistic processes for some time, brought forward the idea of planning a program that would join the two lines of research – his and Lima’s. And so PlusAfroT was born, a residency which takes place from January to March in Munich, Germany.
The concept for the program was conceived through conceptual triggers, i.e. themes that bridge the research of both Plataforma Plus and Afro-T: self-preservation, self-care and colonial trauma; politics of memory, re-signification and de-colonialization practices; foreign bodies; intertextuality, intersection, multi and inter-disciplinarity. Among these themes, inter/multi-disciplinarity was essential for selecting who would join the program. “First we brainstormed artists from different disciplines, so that those boundaries could be blurred, in order to achieve a contamination between works and processes. All the artists respond in some way to the questions we’re investigating, which helps us to have a body capable of creating diverse practices for collective learning,” explain Lima and Lopes.