MENTAL RURAL
15th anniversary of the Binaural Nodar artist residency program in sound and media arts.
Artist Residency with Angie Saiz, Alma Sauret-Small, Miguel Tavares and Rui Catalão.
June 7th to 26th, 2021
Villages of the Municipality of Vouzela and village of Vouzela

The Binaural Nodar artist residency program for 2021, which celebrates fifteen years of artistic hosting in sound, media and performance arts in rural contexts of the Portuguese region of Viseu Dão Lafões, proposes as a theme for hosted projects artistic dialogues between places and psychological experiences, to be developed from direct contact with local landscapes and rural communities and/or emanating from reflections and personal experiences of the artists themselves.

Angie Saiz (Chile)

Chilean artist Angie Saiz proposes a configuration, based on the symbolic landscape of Vouzela, of a collection of audiovisual poems that dialogue with the current fragile state of normality, one that is disposable, unstable and vulnerable. Through cartography, documentation and artistic production, the artist residency is understood as an urgent space for creation, an opportunity to resume suspended practices and a possibility to meet other people. The project plays on the concept of ecotone – from the Greek eco- (oikos or house) and tone, (tonality or tension): natural transition zone between two different ecosystems or ecological boundaries – using this notion from biology displaced to geographical, archeologic, historic and natural contexts, as sources for the construction of personal and collective memory-forgetfulness.

Angie Saiz (n. Santiago, Chile 1977) is a visual artist with production in painting, photography, public actions, video installation and sound art. Her work develops aesthetic issues from the biographical imaginary, the intersection and crisis between old-new technologies and the concepts of time, limbo and ruin. She exhibited at important spaces in Chile, such as the MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, the MAVI Museum of Visual Arts and the Metropolitan Gallery. She also held artist residencies, exhibitions and curatorships in Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and the United States. In addition, she is a visual arts publisher and producer. She currently lives and works carrying out exhibition and curatorial projects, both in Chile and abroad.

Alma Sauret-Small

During the artist residency in Vouzela, the French composer, interpreter and luthier Alma Sauret-Small will focus her attention on the harmonies of calling instruments that are capable of producing emotional and psychological effects that provide and reveal an interiority and an otherness through their vibrations and dissonances, being interested in their specific status as “relational” instruments, that is, that only have meaning and value because they create a relationship with people, with practices, resonating with them and in themselves.

Alma Sauret-Small is a French composer, instrumentalist and luthier. She holds a degree in artist expression from École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Grenoble, studied viola da gamba at the Regional Conservatory of Grenoble and building of musical instruments at FCMB de Grenoble. She is a co-creator and active member of the Loifol association with Emerra Segarra, with whom she develops editorial, educational and intergenerational projects. In 2017, Alma Sauret-Small undertook an Eramus+ internship with Binaural Nodar under which she collaborated in the organization of artist residencies and the setting up of multimedia exhibitions, having also created some sound pieces and a radio broadcast.

Miguel Tavares

Miguel Tavares’ project would not exist without going through the current pandemic, which again activated his mental and muscular memory of being forced to be confined at home. The artist will use the three weeks of artist residency to reflect between a supposedly idyllic rural environment where anxiety does not seem to exist and the city as a possible inducer of agoraphobic drives, developing an ambulatory and personal approach, which appears intimate and gives access to time one seeks to present as its own. Along with the dictaphone, the artist will also record stereo tracks based on sound notes offered by nature in the places chosen for reflections.

Miguel Tavares holds a degree in Cinema and Moving Image from Ar.Co, having also completed an advanced course in fine arts at the same institution. He is a professor in the cinema and moving image department at Ar.Co, a musician under the name of Calypso and co-founder of the cinematographic collective Simulacro. He presented his video works and audiovisual installations in various contexts such as the Fuso – Lisbon International Video Art Festival, IndieLisboa, New Filmmakers NEXXT Festival, Meconio – Muestra de Nuevos Cineastas de Madrid and the SOMA festival. Miguel Tavares has also developed camera work, editing and post-productions in films by directors such as Pedro Costa (“Cavalo Dinheiro”) and Edgar Pêra (“Lisbon Revisited”).

Rui Catalão (with Madiu Furtado)

Rui Catalão has been developing a theatrical project which he titled “At the shelter of the distance”. Having started out as a set of chronicles from the confinement experience, the artist realized that in the community where he has worked for the past six years – Vale da Amoreira – more than two thirds of the population grew up in a family context in which one of the parents, or even both, is absent. For the artist residency in Vouzela Rui Catalão decided to keep the same target of study: interviewing local population, and trying to understand what kind of stories occur, with regard to experiences in which parents (the mother, the father, both) were absent, even if episodically: The cause of the separation, the way of life it provided and the consequences of this separation, both in family relationships and in the relationship with the community… The project will have the collaboration of journalist Madiu Furtado in conducting interviews.

Rui Catalão has a degree in social communication from UAL, has been a film critic since his adolescence at Jornal de Sintra and was a music journalist and literature critic at Público, where he still episodically collaborates. He also writes a monthly section in GQ magazine. As a playwright, he collaborated with João Fiadeiro, Ana Borralho and João Galante, Miguel Pereira, Tonan Quito, Elmano Sancho, Diana Niepce, Mihai Mihalcea, Eduard Gabia, Manuel Pelmus, Mihaela Dancs, Brynjar Bandlien, Madalina Dan among other, raising awareness and creating narratives based on personal experiences, which he called “The game of difficult questions”, which resulted, for example, in the theater workshops “Now you do it”, as well as the several plays he created in Vale da Amoreira with a group of young people of African origin who interpret their own stories, with narratives of war, life in the suburbs and the African diaspora: “And now we”, “Adriano no longer lives here”, “Fear on the way” and “The Mandjako Girl”.

Madiu Furtado Embaló (Bubaque, Guinea-Bissau, 1992). He left Guinea-Bissau during the civil war, when he was eight, and settled with his mother and brothers in Vale da Amoreira, where he lived for 16 years. His father stayed in Guinea. He was a journalist for the regional daily newspaper “O Setubalense” and collaborated with “Observador” newspaper. He has a degree in Social Communication and Marketing at the Polytechnic Institute of Setúbal. He wrote the novel “One of Us”, about the African community on the south bank of the Tagus river. He is the author of the texts for “Under the distance”, the new play by Rui Catalão.