Introduction

MAUMAUS

Founded in 1992, "Associação Maumaus - Centro de Contaminação Visual" is a non-profit cultural association that promotes the debate, knowledge and dissemination of contemporary art-related subjects.

Since it was founded, the Association has included a School of Visual Arts, through which it develops the Independent Study Programme of Visual Arts, which is internationally renowned and acts as an alternative to the current panorama of graduate-level art education in Portugal. The programme offers artists who have concluded their studies and their first experiences in the field of art an intellectually dense atmosphere and demanding practice, in which all possible techniques for artistic expression are used.

In recent years, the association has founded the Maumaus Publisher and inaugurated the Lumiar Cité exhibition space. Maumaus has also started to produce films and has recently implemented an International Artists in Residence Programme.

With this intense and innovative range of activities, the Maumaus Association proposes to put Lisbon on the map of cities participating in the construction of cultural discourses in Europe and worldwide, establishing a stimulating programme in a dynamic and interesting city that has a rich history and offers countless possibilities for the development of a broader vision of art. Together these dynamics allow new strategies to be developed and we believe that they can contribute extensively to the problematisation of the visual culture that characterises today's society, analysing and reflecting on the impact that visual languages now have on knowledge acquisition and on the representation and signification processes involved in individual and collective identity construction.