RE_ACT
CONTEMPORARY

Re_Act Contemporary is a laboratory and residency programme based in the Azores Islands, an archipelago located in the middle of the North Atlantic where geography, history and imagination intersect. Situated within this singular territory,often associated with the mythical notion of Atlantis, the programme operates as a space for research and experimentation, bringing together artistic practices, critical thinking and interdisciplinary knowledge.

Conceived as a laboratory, the programme gathers contemporary artists, curators and institutions alongside scholars, thinkers, activists, scientists, biologists, geologists and other experts. This constellation of perspectives fosters an ecology of knowledge that exceeds disciplinary boundaries, opening up new ways of understanding and inhabiting the world.

Through a programme that includes institutional exhibitions, performances, publication, podcasts, screenings and open talks, the laboratory extends beyond the residency format, creating platforms for public and community engagement and collective reflection. Participants engage in in situ research and project development, enabling direct interaction with the environmental, social and cultural contexts of the territory, as well as with the communities and ecosystems that shape it.

The curatorial approach unfolds through an immersive dialogue with myth, ancestral knowledge and more-than-human elements and multiple forms of diaspora or displacement, both human and natural, within a moment marked by climate breakdown, biodiversity collapse, chemical saturation, Within this framework, the archipelago becomes a site of listening and speculation, where different temporalities and layers of reality converge.

Rather than a remote or isolated location, in a Pan-Oceanic enviroment, the Azores emerge as an expanded field of relations, a rock in the midl of the Atlantic and between continents, matter and non-matter, the visible and the invisible, past and future. The laboratory positions itself as an apparently neutral yet deeply charged territory, where artistic practices and critical inquiry intertwine to reimagine modes of existence, perception and belonging in the contemporary world.

Re_act was Co-Founded by Paulo Arraiano and Paulo Ávila Sousa.