Summer school on disobedience and exhibition program

The call for papers for the Summer School on Disobedience (June 29–July 3, 2026) is out! 

Confirmed guests include Ato Quayson (Stanford University), Ângela Ferreira (artist), Marco Scotini (curator), Markus Messling (University of Saarland), Sergei Loznitsa (film director), with further participants to be announced.

This edition of the Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema will take place in Lisbon and it is organized in collaboration with the XVI Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture and in connection with Disobedience Archive, a long-term curatorial project by Marco Scotini. An iteration of the exhibition will be presented at the Amélia de Mello Foundation Gallery in Lisbon, in collaboration with Ângela Ferreira.

The Summer School brings together keynote lectures, workshops, master classes, paper and poster presentations, alongside cultural programming such as film screenings. Disobedience is approached both as an artistic practice and as a critical concept, examined through its multiple forms, dynamics, and limits. By addressing macro and micro acts of refusal and dissent, as well as visible and invisible tactics that challenge oppressive systems or disrupt established orders, the program frames disobedience as a transformative and creative force.

The full call for papers is available online. The deadline for proposals is February 8, 2026.

SoA Exhibition Program 2026
In 2026, the School of Arts (SoA) will present exhibitions of original projects developed specifically for its gallery, alongside new iterations of ongoing exhibitions. In Porto, the annual program opens in January with Glossolalia, a collaborative exhibition by Tiago Madaleno and Joana Patrão, on view from January 15 to February 21, 2026. Curated by Nuno Crespo, the exhibition proposes an immersive journey through image, sound, and narrative, imagining a couple navigating questions of communication and shared experience through a fictional road trip.

In March, the program continues with an exhibition by Teatro Praga, a collective whose work moves between visual art, performance, and institutional critique. In May, the SoA will host an exhibition by Rodrigo Cass, whose research-based practice explores architecture, space, and political imagination. The exhibition cycle concludes in October with a presentation by Juan Araújo, whose work addresses histories of representation, image circulation, and cultural memory. Further details on the full program will be announced soon.

As part of the Porto Summer School on Art & Cinema, the SoA will also organize, in Lisbon, the exhibition Disobedience Archive. Initiated by Marco Scotini in Berlin in 2005, the project began as a traveling exhibition of videos, graphic materials, and ephemera, later evolving into an ongoing, multi-phase film archive and discursive platform dedicated to the relationship between artistic practice and political action.

In recent years, the Archive of Disobedience has been presented at institutions including Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), Nottingham Contemporary, Raven Row (London), MIT (Boston), Bildmuseet (Umeå), and Castello di Rivoli (Turin), with one of its most recent iterations shown at the 2024 Venice Biennale.

Applications open at School of Arts at Universidade Católica Portuguesa
The SoA offers a diverse range of programs across Cinema, Sound and Image and Conservation and Restoration. The first phase of applications for Master’s programs will open in the beginning of February, for degrees in Cinema, New Media Art, Sound Design, Animation, Conservation and Restoration, and Enterprise Management for the Creative Industries. PhD applications in Science and Technology of the Arts and Conservation and Restoration will open during the same period. 

Bachelor’s applications for international students are currently open until January 15, 2026 (1st phase) for Cinema, Sound and Image and Conservation and Restoration, with a 2nd application phase scheduled from February 23 to April 7, 2026. Find information about these and other programs here.

The SoA also maintains an intense cultural program, including artist residencies (with former residents such as Rosângela Rennó, Matías Piñeiro, Letícia Ramos, Ben Russell, Nuno da Luz, Ana Vaz, Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, and Salomé Lamas), a cycle of conferences with invited artists, filmmakers, and scholars, and a regular exhibition program. Since 2018, the School has presented exhibitions by João Maria Gusmão, Ângela Ferreira, Francisco Tropa, Mónica de Miranda, Mariana Caló & Francisco Queimadela, Julião Sarmento, and Guido Guidi, among others. SoA also received film directors for workshops or as invited professors, such as:  Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lucrecia Martel, Céline Sciamma, Kléber Mendonça Filho, Claire Atherton, Ben Rivers, Jazmín Lopez, Miguel Gomes, João Pedro Rodrigues, among others.