Echoes of Leaving and Returning: Senses of migration in the civil parish of Calde

Echoes of Leaving and Returning: Senses of migration in the civil parish of Calde
A project by Luís Costa, Ana Rodríguez and Liliana Silva for Binaural Nodar

Organization: Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde Civil Parish Council of Calde.

With Graciano Lourenço, Virgínia Lourenço Pereira, José de Almeida Gonçalo, Virgínia de Jesus, António Santos, Cidália Santos, Maria do Carmo Campos, Luís Maurício, Cidália Costa, Alcina de Jesus, António Brito Martins and José Fernandes.

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.

Within the scope of a project dedicated to migratory phenomena, entitled “Echoes of Leaving and Returning” that Binaural Nodar is developing in several Portuguese territories and in countries such as Switzerland, Brazil and Uruguay, the Binaural Nodar team carried out in September 2022 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.).

Project co-financed by the Municipality of Viseu, under a support protocol, and by the General Directorate of Arts, under a biennial structural funding.