BORDERING RURALITIES
Jorge Pascual and Luis Costa

Artist residency
March,19th – 31st, 2023
Municipality of Viseu (Portugal)

An artist residency by Jorge Pascual and Luís Costa has finished, one that was held in eight places bordering the city of Viseu: Pascoal, Abraveses, Santiago, Rio de Loba, Ranhados, Repeses, Orgens and Campo. The field work was carried out in the context of a creative project that from now on is entitled “Bordering Ruralities” (“Ruralidades Limítrofes”) and it brought together poetic texts, chronicles, photography, video, soundscapes and orality, with the aim of constructing various presentation formats, to be announced soon.

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“The project arose from an interest in collaborating and adding to this collaboration with Luís Costa our different origins and also our specific artistic development. Objects or customs belonging to citizens sometimes disappear, to reappear in a second life or with new owners;

This was the beginning of my project “Walking Peripheries” developed in San Sebastián / Donostia in 2019 which was funded by the Deputation of Culture of Guipúzcoa, and it was the background to start this new collaboration, albeit with a different perspective, in which two artists walk from the rural towards the urban part of a city.

Walking has become something exceptional and talking about walking is a proposal to return to slowness, and is also a social and political response to the transformations that occur in our ways of life.”

(Jorge Pascual)

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“Where do one draw the line between what is a city and what is already something else? What specificities can the rural border of a city like Viseu have? How has the landscape of this rural/urban space changed over time? What can the senses detect about life in these places, which today are in a transition process?”

These questions result from almost twenty years of personal observations in rural areas of the Viseu region, associated with collections and creative projects developed/hosted at Binaural Nodar, where one feels a slow but constant evanescence of traditional rural life and its gradual replacement by new generations and their ways of life, no longer based on food production, which ends up changing the very landscape of places.

The collaboration with Jorge Pascual turns out to be a way of proposing an external perspective, of someone used to think and create from what I would name “oblique views”. He is the one who arrives from the outside and who sees things that, often, the locals seem to no longer detect, due to the force of day-to-day habits.”

(Luis Costa)

“Bordering Ruralities” is a project financially supported by the Municipality of Viseu.

Binaural Nodar is a professional cultural structure supported by biennial funding from the General-Directorate for Arts, located in the intervention zone of the Directorate for Culture of the Centre Region.