The College of Arts of the University of Coimbra and the platform UmbigoLAB will start a collaboration program in March, in the development of activities in partnership with the Doctoral Course in Contemporary Art and the Master in Curatorial Studies, included in the Of(f)-Campus Seminar which intends to expand research in art beyond the academic space. This program will allow students to get involved in a specialized community of agents, establishing a symbiotic relationship between artistic, curatorial and investigative practice, expanding the formative context and making it intertwine with an innovative project of contemporary reflection.

Born under the umbrella of Umbigo Magazine and the Millennium bcp Foundation, UmbigoLAB seeks to cross contemporary artistic and curatorial practices, stimulating new synergies between institutional and independent agents beyond conventional structures, systems and strategies. Based on a social network and networking system, and composed of artists and curators, UmbigoLAB aims to establish a collaborative wave in the various spectrum of the art system.

The College of Arts is an organic unit of the University of Coimbra deeply committed to bringing contemporary art and contemporary art practices into the core of advanced academic studies; its arts-based research is multifaceted and interdisciplinary exploring and developing common ground with space-time practices such as architecture, cinema, curatorial practices and performing arts. The College of Arts positions itself in the crossroads of scientific qualitative conceptualization and the non-verbal empirical research for knowledge and meaning within art-making and art reception. It looks at the present and the future of artistic practices with an informed and investigative knowledge of its recent history, and the theoretical and critical reflection that they sparked. The College of Arts is an institution that fully operates in the field of theoretical and empirical ​​knowledge on art practices, and where qualitative arts-based research, creative practices, have actively contributed to the development of innovative teaching procedures.

The program will be coordinated by the artist, curator and teacher Ana Rito.