The Centre for Art History and Artistic Research (CHAIA), University of Évora, Portugal, discusses how art and heritage can become knowledge and innovation.

The Centre for Art History and Artistic Research (CHAIA) (www.chaia.uevora.pt) is a research and development unit of the University of Évora, Portugal, that is included in its doctoral school, the Institute for Advanced Studies and Research (IIFA) (www.iifa.uevora.pt), and carries out its scientific activity in the field of Arts and Humanities. It is located in the city of Évora, which has been listed as a World Heritage site by UNESCO since 1986, in the Alentejo region, southern Portugal, a part of the country still of Mediterranean climate and culture.

­Established in 1987, and evaluated and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) since 1998, CHAIA is one of the oldest Arts and humanities research centres of Portugal. Having the history of art as its first field of work, the centre soon engaged in a multidisciplinary strategy and a transdisciplinary approach by gradually integrating researchers from the fields of landscape, music and musicology, theatre, visual arts, architecture, design, archaeology and philosophy. The confluence of this multidisciplinarity with a transdisciplinary approach materialised with the definition of two core axes of research and action: artistic research and heritage studies.

Heritage studies

Through these two structuring axes, CHAIA has been specialised in artistic and heritage research as ways of studying how scientific and technological development has changed our perception of time and space, of individual and collective identities, of ideas and artistic practices, and of humanities as an area of knowledge capable of being involved critically, politically and prospectively. In the heritage studies axis the digital heritage and cyber-archaeology research stands out on a national and international scale, in particular with the project ‘City and Spectacle: A vision of pre-earthquake Lisbon’.1 The first goal of this project is to digitally recreate 18th Century Lisbon from the eve of the 1755 earthquake. At the same time, it tests the possibility of making use of digital technology to virtually transform the past into a humanities research laboratory, where it will be possible to enable new interactions between historical sources, facts and information, and to test new hypotheses through 3D modelling, particularly of buildings, infrastructures, urban spaces and events.

The results of those new interactions of facts, sources, information and hypotheses will already be part of a new digital epistemology. Following the City and Spectacle project, CHAIA has been part of the Virtual Archaeology International Network (INNOVA) since 2014, which includes 50 research units from 23 countries on four continents. INNOVA is co-ordinated by SEAV-Spanish Society of Virtual Archaeology, the association responsible for the Seville Charter, one of the international documents, along with the London Charter, that regulate digital heritage. INNOVA offers an international master’s degree entitled ‘Virtual Heritage: Cultural Heritage in the Digital Era’. More recently, in partnership with CIDEHUS (www.cidehus.uevora.pt), another research unit of the University of Évora, and the City Council of Évora, work is in progress to virtually recreate various historical periods of this city, from Roman times to the 19th Century. At the moment, the work on the Islamic period of the city is completed.

Also within the heritage studies axis, CHAIA, with other research centres, such as the Laboratorio HERCULES (http://www.hercules.uevora.pt), also of the University of Évora and specialised in heritage applied sciences, is developing a transdisciplinary process for the creation of a heritage language and methodology that is transversal and common to science, technology and humanities, with the aim of bringing them together in an integrated approach of specific heritage-related problems. Until now, this process has materialised through the creation of two specialised educational cycles: an Erasmus Mundus master’s programme in archaeometry, the ARCHMAT (http://www.erasmusmundus-archmat.uevora.pt/index.html) – a partnership with the universities of Sapienza (Rome) and Aristoteles (Thessaloniki); and a doctoral programme, the HERITAS – heritage studies – a partnership with the University of Lisbon. The innovative nature of the HERITAS transdisciplinary advanced graduation was recognised by FCT, which awarded it 36 research grants and 24 doctoral grants, to be distributed over four years. Moreover, with the same multidisciplinary approach, the online journal MIDAS – Museums and Interdisciplinary Studies (http://midas.revues.org) is being published in collaboration with CIDEHUS, the New University of Lisbon, the University of Coimbra and the University of Oporto.

Artistic research

On the other hand, at the core of the artistic research axis, the relationship between art, science and technology is evident in the research carried out under the visual arts doctoral programme that has an emphasis on the transversality with media, cultural studies, metamedia and design.

The University of Évora’s educational field of landscape architecture has one of the oldest traditions in Portugal. Among its former and current teachers are those who introduced the subject in Portugal and some of its most relevant experts. We can therefore see why landscape has been one of the founding scientific areas of CHAIA, especially the research regarding the history of gardens and landscape transformations in Portugal and the Mediterranean region, and its ecological, cultural, social and economic impacts.

Over the past two years, the research carried out on urban gardens and their contribution to maintain our way of life and a more sustainable future has had an increasing effect on the international scientific community, notably through the partnership established with the University of Seville to study urban neighbourhoods and their role in a balanced and sustainable city development. Landscape researchers are also responsible for co-ordinating the online journal2 jointly edited with the New University of Lisbon and the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon.

At CHAIA the concept of landscape, because of its systemic approach that involves the linking of different factors, including the biophysical and the cultural, has also been used to aggregate  joint research on trans and/or interdisciplinarity, materialised in the organisation of thematic seminars on landscape and heritage (2011-2014), which discussed the relevance of landscape in different disciplinary fields. Included in this new conceptual approach is the study of megalithic monuments, rock art and Roman settlements (particularly in southern Portugal and the Spanish region of Extremadura), as well as the research strand in art and community, with emphasis on the social role of art and projects in art history (the project ‘The Baroque Tile Route’ in Alentejo), theatre (projects in puppetry, acting and street theatre), visual arts (projects involving rural communities and on art and gender), design (the project Alentejo By Design), and architecture – all with a strong component of traditional and local Arts and knowhow recovery, revitalisation and recreation, and of its possible uses in creative industries and tourism.

The CHAIA research profile reveals an institutional mission that answers to the needs of the regional context in which it is situated, the city of Évora and the Alentejo region and, at the same time, projects its scientific results, reflection and the ensuing discussion onto an international stage through three prevailing research lines: heritage, identities and historiographies; Arts and digital humanities; and community and the social role of art.

1. http://lisbon-pre-1755-earthquake.org/city-and-spectacle-a-vision-of-pre...
2. http://www.chaia_gardens_landscapesofportugal.uevora.pt/PDFs/journal3/G&...

Professor Paulo Simões Rodrigues
CHAIA – Centre for Art History and Artistic Research
+351 266 706 581
psr@uevora.pt
http://www.chaia.uevora.pt/en

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