Vozes de Magaio Festival
October 1st to 3rd, 2011
São Pedro do Sul, Portugal
www.binauralmedia.org
Binaural / Nodar and Aldeias de Magaio Association present Vozes de Magaio Festival – Sheltering and Transhumating the Oral Tradition, which will take place between October 1st and 3rd in the Civil Parishes of Candal and Manhouce (municipality of São Pedro do Sul, Viseu district)
1. Introduction
The voice is the main instrument of human communication. The voice draws and transmits content, creates links between subjects and involves listening and participation. The voice (ours and others) takes us out, frees us from the unbearable weight of repetition, which otherwise we would be confined to. Voice is sound, is a symbol of interiority otherwise inexpressible. The voice prepares the sense of place where the word will be said.
In the rural region of the Portuguese mountain range of Gralheira (S. Pedro do Sul Municipality), inhabited by communities that had subsistence agriculture and herding as dominant activities, and in which electricity and, consequently, TV, arrived only about 30 years ago, all knowledge and communication had the human voice as their medium. This fact was enough to give a dense richness to the whole oral discourse… the idiosyncrasy, the puzzling, the subliminal, the accents… issues that increasingly are being more standardized. These rural villages of the São Pedro do Sul Municipality, recently integrated in the Aldeias de Magaio network of villages, still maintain traces of this orality that manifest itself in all the aspects of everyday practical, mental and spiritual life.
The Vozes de Magaio Festival proposes to create a dialogue between all forms of rural oral heritage and contemporary art forms centered in the human voice and that work with issues as origin, meaning, the relationship with the sacred (reconnected to its meaning and ancestral symbolism of mystery and symbol), the voice as a pivotal element of rituals, customs and superstitions, able to enchant the listener and bring deep changes to the reality, in the communities and territory, the voice as the protagonist of memories, myths, archetypes, folk wisdom handed down through the centuries, or even the voice of everyday, tool for work and life.
The festival takes place in three different periods throughout 2011 (May, July and October) and includes the presence of tens of local and international artist and offers a vast program aimed at different audiences: performances, sound installations, environmental activities, conferences, discovery of the local oral and musical heritage, traditional balls, gastronomy, etc.
2. Presentations of Magaio Voicescapes Art Creations
The main nucleus of the festival program consists of live presentation of five sound/vocal art projects developed throughout the month of September at a collective artist residency organized by Binaural/Nodar and hosted by Pés na Terra, at Retiro da Fraguinha, which includes the presence of seven artists from Portugal, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium, Holland, Israel and England.
This artist residency puts in direct and deep contact internationally known artists with isolated landscapes and communities such as Candal, Póvoa das Leiras, Coelheira (Candal Civil Parish) and Manhouce, Gestosinho, Gamoal, Vilarinho, Muro, Malfeitoso, Salgueiro and Sequeiro (Civil Parish of Manhouce).
Following is a description of the art projects and biographies of the artists-in-residency:
Patrícia Azevedo (Brazil) & Clare Charnley (UK)
Projecto Gestosinho
The artists’ proposal is to create interactions with people in the area of Manhouce, its social and geographical space, identity and memory, to achieve a sound poem, using red sound chips, such as those found in talking toys. Questioning the power of oral culture and that of the rural world that still maintains a special relationship with the landscape and its uses, the artists will weave a poetic fabric of overlapped material and immaterial realities. The recording process is to walk and to record in sound chips a series of sound figures found in landscapes and everyday life scenes, and then to invite people to listen to them and to create a free translation of sound to the voice, an onomatopoeia or figure of speech, using their own voice, to be recorded on another audio chip.
Clare Charnley (UK) and Patricia Azevedo (BR) work in partnership since 2007. They use different media – photography, audio, video, performances – to develop projects that equate observations on language, territory and power relations. They locate their own work not only on the artifacts | images they conceive but also on the established relationships between people and the communicative act itself. By working together they received awards from Visiting Arts and British Council and were finalists in the Northern Art Prize 2009. They were also, in 2010, commissioned to develop projects at Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; Besfast Exposed, Belfast; PSL Gallery, Leeds; Crunchtime, York. In addition, Patricia Azevedo is a professor of Visual Arts at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil and Clare Charnley is a Professor of Fine Arts from Leeds Metropolitan University.
Rogério Nuno Costa (Portugal)
Vou à tua Mesa
The project “Vou à tua Mesa” (“I’m going to your table”) comes in the context of the trilogy “Eu Vou a tua Casa” (“I’m going to your house”) (2003/2006), a theatrical performance that happened at the homes of viewers, in public spaces to the viewers choice and at the artist’s own home. During the third phase of the project “Eu Vou a tua Casa” (generally sub-titled “Side C”, 2006) the project “Vou à tua Mesa” began to take its first steps. The performance was the creation of a relational and conferencial context that happened at the table for a meal prepared by the artist, while host, speaker, chef, master of ceremonies and moderator of a fictionalized working meeting. The food is in this context not only a powerful metaphor denouncing the concepts of intimacy and closeness (dear to the entire trilogy), but also the pluperfect pretext for the realization of an idea of theatrical performance as a “meeting” using the specific element of food as a device for a sensitive/sensorial revelation and as macro-concept, at the same time performative, ritualistic, visual and relational.
Lives and works in Lisbon, as an artist, researcher and teacher. He graduated in Social Communication and attends the Master in Contemporary Culture and New Technologies. He worked with the Teatro Praga, Sónia Baptista, Lúcia Sigalho, Alain Béhar, Rosa Coutinho Cabral, Nelson Guerreiro, Teresa Prima, among others. Also collaborated with several companies and structures, such as: Alkantara, CCB, Centro em Movimento, Chão de Oliva, Sonda Festival, Quarta Parede, Transforma AC, APAP,[msdm], Buda Arts Centre, Dance Kiosk and Tanz Fabrik. As creator, highlights the work: “I’m going to your house – Trilogy” (2003/2006), “Miss the Time When Text was Said” (2003), “Actor” (2004), “Documentation Project” (2006 / 2007) and “The Opportunity of the Spectator” (2007/2008). Currently, dedicated to the career of a chef with the project “Vou à tua mesa.”
http://www.rogerionunocosta.com
Josef Sprinzak (Israel)
Bedtime Stories & Lullabies
A series of intimate performances in homes of families in the villages of the Gralheira region in front of children and parents. As a sound and vocal artist performer, Josef Sprinzak will come to private sleeping places taking the role that combines between the musician-poet-storyteller and the “stranger” who performs vocal pieces and ritualistic actions that are based on foreign languages – mainly Hebrew, Gibberish and perhaps a bit of English. The bedtime performance is a format that explores the voice in a context lying between the functional and the artistic, the recognized and the estranged. The sessions will have an interactive nature that will exceed standard theatrical relations of performer/audience and become “events” in the sense of the visual performance art tradition. The bedtime events will be rendered through use of objects, portable sound sources, vocal acts and role switching between the participants and the performer.
Josef Sprinzak is a sound and performance artist living and working in Tel Aviv. His professional training includes computer science, visual theater and voice work. He is among the first text sound/sound poetry artists in Israel and his work consists of accurate scores of speech, recorded speech, vocalizations, body gestures, movements and spatial relations dealing with private and collective identity, relations between language and consciousness, history and memory.
http://www.myspace.com/josefsprinzak
Carmina Escobar (Mexico)
Carmina Escobar proposes the development and realization of a concert- performance in which she will look for the integration of diverse elements, sonic objects and experiences that the space proposes to her own aesthetic speech, coined mainly into the involvement of a personal narrative and corporal and sonorous language within the creation of a scenic space in which the ritual of performance itself is driven and linked by the voice in its naked form or electronically processed. The concert – performance will be developed as well as a sonic installation, which will have as a main task the tying of the community as an active part of the creative processes that would take place within this residency.
Carmina Escobar is a singer and multimedia artist from Mexico City that has collaborated in many dif¬ferent projects, which explore a diversity of sonorous languages such as medieval music, opera, contemporary music, folk music, electronic music and experimental trends involving interdisciplinary collaborations and multimedia. As a soloist she has performed concerts of contemporary repertoire for solo voice, the premieres of works by young composers and performances of her own compositions. She is beholder of a master degree in Voice Performance by the California Institute of the Arts, master focused on extended vocal techniques, improvisation and interdisciplinary and multimedia performance.
http://www.carminaescobar.com
Toine Horvers (The Netherlands) & Myriam Van Imschot (Belgium)
Walking, singing, talking the landscape
Both artists share an invested interest in language, sound and voice at the intersection point where people and places meet. For the Nodar Artist Residency program they would like to engage in an experimental mapping of the network of “Aldeias de Magaio”, focusing on the interconnectedness of the villages in the region and their surroundings. Rural villages are often thought of as being isolated, yet, they function in a complex web of movements, passages, traffic of desires and knowledge, involving both humans, animals, fauna and flora.
Toine and Myriam will experience the movement and connections of the roads and alternate smaller routes, embracing the accidental encounters on their way. This will lead to a sound-based and verbal work, which may involve drawing and sound recordings, dealing with the elasticity of distance and time, the alternation of arrivals, departures, transitions, destination and getting lost, etc. in a landscape in perpetual motion as we cross it.
Toine Horvers, a visual artist works with language and text, in both visual and audial/performative ways. He wants to give language a ritual form, to create a temporary sculpture out of language, a gesture in space and time. He presents the descriptions of his observations of situations and processes from the his surrounding world, in different media: performance (solo or group) handwritten books, sound installations or electronic text displays. The voice plays an essential role in his performances, solo it is the instrument that determinates his place in space. In more expanded projects and performances the voice is the medium by which people and places can be connected, sometimes in one space, sometimes over long distances.
http://www.toinehorvers.nl/
Myriam Van Imschoot (1969) started her performance and art practice with performance lectures. Originally a writer, she has been influenced by artists like Vito Acconci, who as a poet traded the page for other media. In that vein she looks for the slippery passages where she can slide into other fields of expression, often unknown to her. The artistic work that she developed over the past years in the series ‘Expanded Publications’ engages different media and their sensorial potential, such as video, performance and sound installation. Myriam Van Imschoot has been the artistic leader of Sarma (with Jeroen Peeters) since 2003. Amongst other things in 2010-2011 she is developing with vzw Constant internet software specific to publication of audio-documentation and sound poetry.
http://www.sarma.be/nieuw/critics/imschoot.htm
3. Cycle of Conferences “New and Ancient Forms of Inhabiting the Rural Space: A Celebration of the World Day of Architecture”, on October 3rd, 2011
Retiro da Fraguinha (Candal, São Pedro do Sul)
Geographic Coordinates: 40° 51′ 15.60″ N, 8° 10′ 44.37″ W
October 3rd, 2011 | 9.00am – 6.00pm
The cycle of conferences “New and Ancient Forms of Inhabiting the Rural Space”, will take place during the Vozes de Magaio Festival, on October 3rd, 2011 at Retiro da Fraguinha (Candal Civil Parish). With this cycle of conferences, we intend to celebrate the World Day of Architecture through a multidisciplinary reflection on the ancestral uses and forms of the architectural typologies associated with agrarian life and of the possible ways for its reuse, taking into account the new “post-agricultural” paradigm that is present in most of the Portuguese rural spaces. This cycle of conferences will include the presence of local inhabitants who know the traditional techniques of construction and of the ancient modes of inhabiting the built spaces, as well as specialists in different disciplines (architecture, anthropology, rural development, etc.), representing a wide range of organizations: municipalities, cultural associations, universities, rural development agencies, etc.
The cycle of conferences is coordinated by Luís Gomes da Costa (president of Binaural/Nodar and Associação Aldeias de Magaio, a network of villages of the Gralheira mountain range) and Maria Carlos Valverde (Graduate Student in Rehabilitation of Architectural and Urban Spaces at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon), with support from the Nucleus of Architects of the Viseu Region. The contents of the conferences will be published on e-book format by Edições Nodar, the publishing project of Binaural/Nodar.
The participation in this cycle of conferences is free, subject to prior sign-up (limited by the capacity of the room) by sending an e-mail to info-binauralmedia.org until September 29th. The lunch has the price of 6 Euros and also requires prior sign-up.
List of Speakers:
Isabel Raposo (Architect | Faculty of Architecture – Technical University of Lisbon)
Fernando Maio Pinto (Architect | Director of the Douro Museum)
Francisco Keil do Amaral (Architect | Viseu Region Nucleus of the Order of Architects)
Elisabete Figueiredo (Sociologist | University of Aveiro)
Fernando Gonçalves (Architect | Architecture Course at Catholic University of Viseu)
Adriano Azevedo (Professor | Vice-President of Tourist Region of Center and Member of São Pedro do Sul City Council)
António Carlos Duarte (Economist | President of Geoparque de Arouca Association)
Isabel Silvestre (Traditional Singer and Writer on Local Traditions | Village of Manhouce)
Arlindo Cunha (Farmer | Village of Rompecilha)
Luís Costa (Economist | President of Binaural/Nodar and Aldeias de Magaio Associations)
Maria Carlos Valverde (Architect | Graduate Student at Faculty of Architecture – Technical University of Lisbon)
Gianfranco Spitilli (Anthropologist | Bambun Association – Region of Abruzzo, Italy)
4. The Complete Program of the Festival
Saturday, October 1st
3.30pm
Presentation of Magaio Voicescapes Art Creations
Patrícia Azevedo and Clare Charnley | Carmina Escobar
Meeting Point: Market Square (Manhouce)
5.30pm
The Voice of Weaving
Live Demonstration of Handicraft and Sackcloth Weaving by Ditoso Saber – Cultural Association
Meeting Point: Market Square (Manhouce)
7.00pm
The Voice of Ingredients
Degustation of Gastronomic Products of Manhouce
Proposed by Ditoso Saber – Cultural Association
Meeting Point: Market Square (Manhouce)
Price per Person: 5 Euros
Sign-up Contacts: *+351 232 723 160 or +351 919 257 865 | info-binauralmedia.org
9.00pm
The Voice of Harvest
Traditional Cornhusking Animated by Members of the Manhouce Singing Group
Proposed by: Ditoso Saber – Cultural Association
Meeting Point: Market Square (Manhouce)
Sunday, October 2nd
10.00am
The Voice of Flour
Corn Bread Making Workshop in Candal
Meeting Point: Terças Square (Candal)
12.30pm
The Voice of Ingredients
Traditional Lunch in Candal
Price of Workshop + Lunch: 10 Euros (6 Euros for children under 12 y.o.)
Sign-up Contacts: +351 232 723 160 or +351 919 257 865 | info-binauralmedia.org
2.30pm
Voices on the Land
Singing Group of Candal
Meeting Point: Terças Square (Candal)
4.00pm
Presentation of Magaio Voicescapes Art Creations
Josef Sprinzak | Rogério Nuno Costa | Toine Horvers and Myriam Van Imschoot
Retiro da Fraguinha (Candal)
7.00pm
Voices at Dusk
Live Concert with “Bailenda” Group (www.www.myspace.com/bailenda )
Retiro da Fraguinha (Candal)
Monday, October 3rd
10.00am – 6.00pm
Cycle of Conferences
World Day of Architecture
New and Ancient Forms of Inhabiting the Rural Space
Retiro da Fraguinha (Candal)
Free Admission | Lunch Subject to Sign-up (6 Euros)
Sign-up Contacts: +351 232 723 160 or +351 919 257 865 | info-binauralmedia.org
5. Credits
Organization:
Binaural/Nodar (http://www.binauralmedia.org/news/)
Aldeias de Magaio Association (http://www.aldeiasdemagaio.org)
Hosting:
Pés na Terra (http://www.pesnaterra.com)
Funding:
Secretariat of State of Culture | Directorate-General of the Arts, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Partners:
São Pedro do Sul City Coucil, CLDS S. Pedro do Sul – O Futuro é Aqui, Ditoso Saber – Cultural Association, Manhouce Singing Group, Vozes de Manhouce, Population of the Civil Parishes of Manhouce and Candal
Contacts:
Binaural/Nodar
Rua de Camões, Nº 6 – 1º Dto. Frente
3660-482 São Pedro do Sul
Portugal
Tel. +351 232 723 160
Email. info-binauralmedia.org
http://www.aldeias-sonoras.org
http://www.aldeiasdemagaio.org