ECHOES OF LEAVING AND RETURNING
Artist residency
September 12th – 24th, 2022
Civil Parish of Calde, Municipality of Viseu
With: Ana Rodríguez (Uruguay), André Araújo (Portugal), Liliana Silva (Portugal), Luís Costa (Portugal), Tomáš Roček (Czech Republic)
Organization: Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde Civil Parish Council of Calde.
From the end of the 19th century to the present, millions of Portuguese emigrated, looking for alternatives to poverty, to a subsistence economy and/or to the lack of job opportunities. As such, emigration is simultaneously part of the memory and present of the Portuguese rural regions. In each village, multiple thematic layers coexist that relate to the different waves of emigration, those more distant in time, to Brazil, Venezuela, the United States of America, etc. or those more recent, to European countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland or Luxembourg.
In the same way, many rural areas today welcome people from the various continents, in a process opposite to that of so many Portuguese, those who emigrated, those who returned and those who preferred not to return.
However, there is an infinite range of topics that it is possible to delve into when contacting with former and current migrants and their descendants, such as architecture, economics, language, the sense of belonging and cultural insertion of those who emigrated and of their descendants, the perceptions about the evolution of places of destination and origin, the type of connection with the rural world, family narratives and document records, the symbology and the semiotics of affection, gastronomy and many others.
Binaural Nodar, in collaboration with the Civil Parish Council of Calde and the Museu of Linen of Várzea de Calde, will host the first artist residency of its 16th annual program of artist residencies in sound arts and media, within which three artistic projects will be hosted, in order to reflect upon and to express aspects related to historical or current migratory processes in the rural areas of the civil parish of Calde:
André Araújo (Portugal):
The young musician and multidisciplinary artist André Araújo will work on the theme of emigration from the conflict between the rural and the urban, questioning how memory, as a prerequisite of being, is related to the conflict between the dreamed and the real paths tracked by the workers’ experiences and how this memory works as a validator of reality, by incorporating various dialectic processes, between the official and the unofficial, the written and the spoken, the recorded and the transmitted.
André Araújo was born in Porto in 1999, he is a musician and visual artist. He studied at the Conservatory of Music in Porto and finished his degree at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and is currently finishing his Masters in Contemporary Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro. The path he followed from jazz and improvised music to electronic music has led him to more recently explore the relationship between visual and sound art.
Ana Rodríguez (Uruguay), Liliana Silva (Portugal) and Luís Costa (Portugal):
The Binaural Nodar team will carry out a series of sound interviews and photographic records with former and current emigrants from the civil parish of Calde, with particular attention to aspects related to the “migrant sensoriality”, that is, to the condition of shared belonging ( between the place of origin and migration) and how it is reflected by the senses (visual and sound landscape, smells, music, gastronomy, objects with symbolic value, etc.). The recordings made will be integrated with documentation produced elsewhere (Uruguay, Brazil, Switzerland), for the creation of a final sound and visual exhibition and a series of podcasts, to be presented in the 4th quarter of 2022 and throughout 2023. .
Ana Rodríguez (b. 1975) was born in Montevideo, has lived and researched in rural contexts since 2001, the year she settled in Tacuarembó, in northern Uruguay. She is an anthropologist graduated from the University of the Republic of Uruguay, attended the Masters in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was part of the pedagogic team of the Rural Studies Nucleus (Tacuarembó Delegation of the University of the Republic of Uruguay) and between 2016 and 2018 she created audiovisual teaching materials on gender and rurality for the Faculty of Agronomy of Uruguay (2016), a CD of oral tradition stories with soundscapes (Los cuentos de Mamá Carolina, 2013), created the Sound Map of Uruguay (2016), and since 2013 she has been an artist and researcher at Binaural Nodar.
Liliana Silva (b. 1991) was born in Santo António, Funchal. In 2014, she finished her degree in Fine Arts, Multimedia Branch at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. That same year, she joined the Master in Multimedia Communication, Interactive Multimedia Branch at the University of Aveiro, which she would conclude in 2016. Since August 2017, she has been responsible for the communication and multimedia areas at Binaural Nodar, having developed an intense activity in area of graphic design, editorial graphics, video recording and editing, exhibition design, etc.
Luís Costa (b. 1968). Curator of contemporary artistic practices, sound researcher, author, educator and cultural animator in a rural context. Chairman of the board of Binaural Nodar. Coordinator of Lafões Cult Lab, an artistic research lab in the territory of Viseu Dão Lafões which has hosted over 150 sound/media artists and social and environmental researchers from over 20 countries. Coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, a research, cataloging and sound/audiovisual mapping project of the collective memory of rural territories in the Viseu region, integrated in the Tramontana Network – European network of digital archives from mountain areas.
Tomáš Roček (Czech Republic):
Czech visual and sound artist Tomáš Roček will focus on emigration from a perspective of an imagined future by people who stayed in rural villages. His idea is to create a multimedia “book” composed of mind maps, sounds, memories, feelings, collections of different materials (organic, artefacts), Incisions, marks, etc. which will form a record of the current time made by people who imagine their own emigration.
Tomáš Roček is a multimedia artist from the Czech Republic who works mainly with text (poetry), video, sound and performance. He likes to explore different mediums that allow him to think differently. He often recycles materials (found footage on old cassettes, objects…) to make his work more sustainable. He also organizes artistic events related to ecology, having founded a festival on art and sustainability (International Landscape Festival TRSY).
The artist residency “Echos of Leaving and Returning” is co-financed by the Municipality of Viseu and by the Portuguese General-Directorate for the Arts.