The current internship report refers to an internship experience at the MArt, a space for
learning and artistic experimentation, in Lisbon, between September 2020 and February
2021. During this six-month period, the Laboratory of Investigation, a program developed for
the MArt residency program in Lisbon, was developed. The Laboratory of Investigation (LoI)
is a place to share, problematize and implement artistic investigation within the context of an
art residency. The program will be presented and analyzed in this report in its projecting,
unfolding and implementation firstly from a more practical level, namely by exploring the institutional conditions that favored its creation and its implementation; secondly, at a conceptual level, drawing from the material collected from the LoI’s two main activities,
such as the research meeting and a collective installation which are presented and grouped
by macro themes to show the general trends of interest. Thirdly, the results are analyzed
through the lens of four main concepts, which are both the pillars of the laboratory as well as
the conceptual tools that serve the analysis: affectivity, conviviality, materiality, and
reflectivity. The LoI advocates for the importance of building a convivial environment in an
art residency and it shows that one way to successfully do so is to reflect, share and document one’s research practice. By doing so, the LoI attempts to tackle two different yet complementary dimensions of an art residency that artist can experience namely its hidden
social life and its more artistic and research-oriented aspects. Ultimately, the LoI shows that research can be a useful tool to move beyond disciplinary boundaries and it can be a vehicle for building more convivial environments
