BLOWS IN THE DOORWAY
Artistic activations of a rural archive
Binaural Nodar and Master of Contemporary Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro
November 2020 – February 2021
A doorway can be a symbol well adjusted to these strange times. This threshold between the intimate stronghold and the outside world has for many been the place of possible contact with the “breaths” of community life. And what if in the concrete difficulty in accessing an equally concrete territory, for example a rural one, we are allowed to see and hear a dense plot of landscapes, actions, voices and memories? What kind of mental and sensory constructions are possible from this interaction? What knowledge is possible to gain with this access? What narratives can be built from life stories of belonging to specific contexts? What links can be established between our own experience and the echoes that reach us from places we have never visited?
“Blows in the doorway” (“Sopros no umbral” in Portuguese) is an artistic activation challenge associated with the access to the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive (www.archive.binauralmedia.org), a repository of about a thousand sound and video documents from the Portuguese territory of Viseu Dão Lafões which cover a wide variety of themes: agricultural cycles, water cycles, cattle raising, traditional songbook, emigration, mining, etc. and types of practice: soundscapes, interviews and recordings of ethnographic contexts, artistic creations, radio broadcasts, etc.
“Blows in the doorway” is part of the 10 year celebration of the partnership between Binaural Nodar and the Master of Contemporary Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro, and the artistic works that are to be conceived will also be part of the same archive and might generate new creative interactions in the future.