WALKING PERIPHERIES
(Where the city of Viseu meets the countryside)
A creation by Jorge Pascual and Luís Costa
19 – 31 March 2023
Peripheral areas of the city of Viseu
A creation of Binaural Nodar, integrated in the Esquina Noroeste project and with the financial support of the Municipality of Viseu
Where can we draw the line between what is a city and what is something else? What specificities can the outskirts of a city like Viseu have? How has this boundary changed over time? How and when rural places have become more urban? How is life in these places today? What can the senses detect about an expanding city?
“Walking peripheries: where the city of Viseu meets the countryside” is a multidisciplinary creative project by Jorge Pascual and Luís Costa, which begins with an itinerant artist residency, by walking through places on the outskirts of the city of Viseu, with the aim of bring together poetic texts, aphorisms and chronicles, but also photography, sound and orality, which will be the subject of various creative iterations and various formats of public presentation. The first version of “Walking peripheries” was developed by Jorge Pascual in the city of San Sebastián (Basque Country, Spain), which resulted in an expanded poem book published in 2022.
This project also celebrates two decades of complicity between Jorge Pascual and Luís Costa, which spanned from the benches in the city of León where both wrote improvised poems, passing through the imagined construction of the biography of a hybrid character, Jorge Luis Carballo da Costa, and for the invitations from Binaural Nodar for Jorge Pascual to participate in performances held in various municipalities in the Viseu region, as a poet and performer, such as “Poética para Supermercados”, “Pilasía” and “Origens”.
Jorge Pascual is a Spanish poet and actor born in 1981, of Leonese origin, but with roots in the El Bierzo area (Castilla y León) and residing in San Sebastián for several years now. He published the poems “Morir de Viento” (ed. Leteo, 2001, Manual de Ultramarinos, 2015) and “Caminan las nubes descalzas”. He is also the author of the book “Me Compras unas alas o me haces una fiesta”, honorable mention in the Eugenio de Nora Poetry Prize (2006). More recently, he has published two expanded poems, based on walks: “El viento ya estáscrito” (2018) and “Periferias caminadas” (2022). He regularly participates in multidisciplinary scenic projects such as the Free Jazz improvisation exercise “Jaula 13” with Ildefonso Rodriguez and the collaboration with La Pequeña Victoria Cen in the poetic circus show “Gigante”, among others.
Luís Costa (1968). Curator of contemporary artistic practices, researcher and sound artist, educator and cultural animator in a rural areas, in the context of Binaural Nodar. Coordinator of Lafões Cult Lab, a multimedia artistic research concept in the territory of Viseu Dão Lafões which has already hosted more than 150 sound/media artists, social and environmental researchers from more than 20 countries. Coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, a research, cataloging and sound and audiovisual mapping project of the collective memory of the rural territories where Binaural Nodar works. In 2011, he co-edited the catalog and double CD “Three Years in Nodar: Context-specific artistic practices in rural Portugal”, edited in 2017 the book + documentary “Várzea de Calde: a village woven in linen” and in 2023 the book “Dancing with the root: Documenting the memory of folklore groups from Castro Daire”. Luís Costa is also the author of two books + CD created as a result of sound education projects: “Sound Memory of Cork” with the participation of children from primary schools in the municipality of Santa Maria da Feira, together with companies and workers from the cork sector and “São Pedro do Sul: New Rural Listenings” based on recordings made by youths in rural villages from the municipality of São Pedro do Sul.
Esquina Noroeste is a variable constellation of connections between places, common people and artists from the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula, created to reflect and to creatively express the historical, cultural and social bonds existing between neighboring territories. An initiative by Binaural Nodar launched in 2021, with participation in a first meeting of La Xata La Rifa, Oficina Galega de outros Asuntos do Movemento and Somospeces≠, and since then hosting other individual and collaborative expressions.