NORTH WESTERN CORNER
Artist residency
November 1st – 10th, 2021
Lafões.Cult.Lab, Vouzela
With: Binaural Nodar (Portugal), Oficina Galega de Outros Asuntos do Movemento (Galicia), La Xata La Rifa (Asturias) and Somospeces (León).
Partnership: Municipality of Vouzela
Far back in millennia, the northwestern territory of the Iberian Peninsula formed something close to a territorial and cultural unit. This fact would be practically irrelevant if we did not confirm even today a fabric of connections between Northern Portugal, Galicia, Asturias and León regions, which are very evident in rural contexts. Types of crops and livestock, tools, vernacular architecture, words, forms of community organization, etc. etc. they embody overt sensations of familiarity (but we also do or say this or that!).
Four artistic collectives from the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, Binaural Nodar (Portugal), Oficina Galega de Outros Asuntos do Movemento (Galicia), La Xata la Rifa (Asturias) and Somospeces (León), which follow a common path, in some cases with fifteen years of complicity, will get together between November 1st and 10th, in the Portuguese village of Vouzela, for an artist residency in which they will share with the other collectives aspects of their respective territories and artistic forms they have been developing (poetry, dance, music, performance, sound art, video, etc.), with the aim of creating some results that can represent a certain idea of being-in-common and, who knows, a manifesto in defense of contemporary culture in rural contexts that resists on the northwestern corner of a peninsula as immense as it is diverse.
Binaural Nodar is a cultural organization that operates in rural regions in the north and center of Portugal in the areas of sound art, multimedia creation, audiovisual ethnographic documentation, sound education, radio creation and publications (online, books, CD, DVD). Since 2006, Binaural Nodar has also been hosting a program of artist residencies in rural context, developing a contemporary cultural programme in several municipalities in the Portuguese region of Viseu Dão Lafões and managing a rural digital archive with more than a thousand sound and video documents.
La Xata la Rifa is an Asturian scenic laboratory, coordinated by choreographer Mónica Cofiño, which investigates other forms of presentation, appeals to new artistic circuits and times, questions the viewer’s gaze and responds to other funding mechanisms. It organizes the Festival La Xata and has taken its shows to locations in the United States, Cuba, Costa Rica, France and Spain. They created the Platform for Floating Artists and live from the desire to intertwine rural development and the performing arts with tradition, passion and innovation.
The Oficina Galega de Outros Asuntos do Movemento is a collective from the northeast part of Galicia directed by poet, performer and cultural producer Marina Oural and psychologist, singer, writer and composer Ugia Pedreira, who, along with other complicities, activate contexts of art and health in rural context such as the development of new artistic creations with subjects that are simultaneously local and contemporary (such as Juana_Inspiracións, who won the Luisa Villalta Prize for Cultural Projects for Equality in the Province of A Coruña), workshops-essays (such as Inclusones18: Art and diversity), creative conversations and other shared formats.
Somospeces is a collective from the province of León, founded by Alfredo Escapa and Marta Alaiz, which works in the field of performing arts, bringing together actors, performers, pedagogues, thinkers and creators. Formed as classic actors, in their studies at the León Choreographic Center and later in their work with Nilo Gallego and Oskar Gómez Mata, the work they currently develop moves between research on public relations, action, empowerment and the common, aspects placed in practice through various (and hybrid) formats, including conferences, community workshops, shows, shared readings, artistic hosting, etc.