Eleonora Fabião is appointed honorary doctor at the Artistic Faculty
At the Conferment of Doctoral Degrees on October 25, the Artistic Faculty’s two honorary doctors of the year were promoted. One of them was Eleonora Fabião.
Eleonora Fabião is a Full Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Researcher of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development in Brazil. She is a performance artist and a theorist, and her performances have been enacted in many different contexts, such as dance and theatre festivals, biennials, exhibitions, universities, schools, sociocultural projects and, mainly, in the streets.
There is something you are only going to experience when performing in the streets
“There is something you are only going to experience when performing in the streets because there is no preestablished frame. Your artistic action will create a certain doubt, a certain suspension of habits, it will alter mechanics of perception and relation. Passersby will ask themselves: what is really going on here? I love this suspension of definition generated by performance art in the streets.”
Eleonora Fabião has contributed significantly to education at the Artistic Faculty at the University of Gothenburg.
After meeting Cecilia Lagerström, Professor of Performance Practices at the Artistic Faculty, in 2019, she was invited as a guest teacher at the Contemporary Performative Arts programme. Following that, an academic and creative collaboration have developed between Eleonora Fabião and Cecilia Lagerström and their two PhD groups in Performance Practices.
The PhD students in Rio de Janeiro, to whom Eleonora Fabião is advisor, and the PhD students in Gothenburg, to whom Cecilia Lagerström is advisor, have been meeting regularly online since April 2023. And, soon, in February 2025, they will have their first seminar in person.
“We started this collaboration with no pretensions, and it turned into an organic and prolific relationship. The mutual support in research and the intercultural dialogue are extremely rich for both groups.”
In 2021 she was a keynote speaker at the fourth biannual PARSE research conference.
Things that must be done
During her visit to Gothenburg to attend the Conferment Ceremony Eleonora Fabião also held an open lecture entitled Things that must be done: artistic experimentation and political imagination, where she shared selected actions from her extensive trajectory as a performance artist. “Things that must be done”, apart from being the name of a series of actions developed in 2015 at the Performa Biennial in New York, is a term she uses to refer to her artistic practice.
“I do things that I believe must be done. I invite people to do these actions collectively and collaboratively. As an artist I feel it is my ethical obligation to perform actions that I believe must be performed with poetic determination. And as the title of the lecture also says, to articulate artistic experimentation and political imagination is a premise.”
To Eleonora Fabião, being named an Honorary Doctor was a surprise and an honour.
“I have been working hard for a long time with articulations between art and democracy, and it is very important for me that an academic collective that I respect so much recognizes that work. I feel extremely grateful and energised for such a meaningful and generous gesture. And, certainly, this is not only a recognition of my work, but of everyone’s involved in the practice.”
Text: Joacim Schmidt De Laval
