The OCUP_EA collective, integrated into the Institute for Research in Art, Design and Society (i2ADS), on the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (FBAUP) was created in response to the need to identify, within schools, alternative spaces for learning. It assumes the organization of a critical programme of action addressing educational systems that are frequently structured around regulatory, hierarchical, and standardized logics of knowledge. The collective departs from a problematization of the forms in which learning is produced, legitimized, and recorded in educational contexts, interrogating the dispositifs that determine what is recognized as validated knowledge and, consequently, what remains invisible, marginal, or excluded from educational archives.

Within this framework, OCUP_EA positions itself in opposition to a conception of learning understood as a measurable, predictable, and predefined outcome. Instead, it proposes an approach that values students’ learning as an emergent, democratic, situated, and relational process, constructed through experience, mutual affectation between subjects, materials, and contexts, and openness to the unforeseen. Artistic Education is here understood, within the field of research, as a space of possibility for the emergence of other epistemologies of learning, capable of accommodating sensitive, embodied, affective, and collective forms of knowledge.

The work developed within OCUP_EA is structured through a rhizomatic, non-linear, and non-hierarchical logic, in which educational and investigative practices expand through connections, crossings, and contaminations between different subjects, contexts, and modes of making. This methodology is not merely an organizational metaphor but constitutes a political positioning that rejects the centrality of a single method, a predefined trajectory, or a fixed object of research. Research is thus assumed as a process in becoming, transformed through its relationship with the subjects and contexts in which it unfolds.

The proposed presentation aims, through a sampling of actions already carried out, to problematize the field of possibilities that can be experienced within schools as ways of fostering knowledge and sensibility among students. The action project seeks to create conditions in which education may emerge from the subjects themselves, understood as social agents, nurturing individual processes of self-construction.

Established in 2021, OCUP_EA has carried out a set of educational actions in different schools, across various levels of learning and in collaboration with local communities. These actions contribute to the formulation of a positive discourse on educational outcomes, grounded in the continuous and relational engagement established with the school communities involved.

Throughout this trajectory, by privileging open-ended processes, OCUP_EA distances itself from research logics oriented toward hypothesis confirmation or the production of closed results, instead valuing the capacity to generate questions, displace certainties, and produce alternative readings of education. Learning is thus understood as something that occurs between subjects, between institutional and non-institutional spaces, between school and context, manifesting itself in multiple, discontinuous, and often unpredictable ways.

The presentation aims not only to express satisfaction with what has been achieved, but also to encourage discussion about the programme's shortcomings and incompleteness, stimulating debate about what its future might hold.

The practices developed by the collective adopt a methodology that privileges action as a driver of research and the involvement of subjects as active participants in the investigative process. Educational activities are organized in workshops, artistic actions, and research-creation processes, not conceived as applications of pedagogical models but as dispositifs of experimentation and learning. These procedures operate simultaneously as educational spaces and as research spaces, where knowledge is not collected as data but produced through relationships, shared experience, and attentiveness to deviations, ruptures, and singularities that emerge throughout the process. The methodology used to present the project includes the audiovisual sampling of actions carried out in the referenced school contexts, the discussion of the issues implicated in and addressed by OCUP_EA, and the proposal of possible forms of interaction.

OCUP_EA presents itself as a research collective that embraces experience as a non-standardized educational space and uncertainty as a productive condition for learning and research processes. Operating from a rhizomatic logic, the group affirms relationships, the unexpected and emergence as contributions to the construction of other ways of thinking about the learning process, knowledge and research in education itself. The liquidity of the results generated by educational processes can only be understood through the lens of the inherent fallibility involved in pursuing the aspirations that projects such as OCUP_EA seek to achieve. The debate that collective aims to provoke acknowledges its own inconclusiveness, while seeks to expand a critical perception of the possibilities for establishing alternative forms of learning in the face of structured and limiting educational systems. The conclusion of OCUP_EA emphasizes the need for continuous, open-ended resistance and experimental resilience in Art Education, particularly in relation to routinized and naturalized practices that contribute little to the development of sensitive subjects and socially engaged actors.

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