5th Edition - November 8–30, 2025
The performativity of friendship
The International Creation Laboratory takes place alongside the festival, providing spaces for exchange between artists, diverse practices and artistic approaches, and opportunities for interaction between completed works, artists in creation, and the audience.In this 5th edition, we bring together 11 artists/creators from different backgrounds (Portugal, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Spain, Italy, and Paraguay) and artistic fields (dance, performance, dramaturgy, cinema), selected by an international jury. This year, we challenge these artists to explore friendship as a practice of freedom, responsibility, and the creation of the common — one of the deepest acts of resistance and care for life.
On 8 November, we invite the audience for an informal gathering, an afternoon getting to know the artists’ projects. Then, over the weekend of 22–23 November, Lab in Fest takes place: two days of exploration of works in progress, where the public can attend performances, talks, and encounters that reveal the questions, doubts, and investigations of the artists in residence.
During these three weeks, Coimbra transforms into a test tube of artistic reflection for these eleven artists, whose proposals range widely: questioning dominant discourses, colonial wounds, cross-border friendships, interspecies relationships, life and death, proto-traditions, the concept of sanctity, life’s dances, the sensitivity of cities, the agency and mutual influence of bodies, the symbolic structures that legitimise inequalities, and containment as a political and aesthetic condition.
The laboratory is conceived as a field for experimentation, learning, and collective knowledge exchange, also providing a space for meeting and networking. Inspired by Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, there are moments of collective work — through workshops led by Carolina Campos and Antonio Tagliarini, process guidance, and feedback sessions — as well as periods of individual work, allowing each creation and investigation to develop. Carolina Campos, choreographer, dramaturge, and theorist, is the guest artist accompanying and critically engaging individually with the participating artists.
If you happen to cross paths with one of them, greet them and make that person a friend.
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