Artist residency
June, 26th to July, 8th 2023
Civil Parish of Côta (Municipality of Viseu)
With: Ana Margarida Ferreira (Portugal), Liliana Silva (Portugal), Luís Costa (Portugal), José Bica (Portugal) and Sofía Balbontín (Chile/Portugal)
Organisation: Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Municipality of Viseu, the Civil Parish Council of Côta and the Associação Desportiva Recreativa e Cultural de Nogueira de Côta.
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 partnership with the Municipality of Viseu, the Civil Parish Council of Côta and the Associação Desportiva Recreativa e Cultural de Nogueira de Côta, will host the third artist residency of its 17th annual program in artist residencies in sound and media arts, with three projects that will express aspects related to migration processes existing in the rural areas of the civil parish of Côta.
Ana Margarida Ferreira, Liliana Silva and Luís Costa (Portugal)
The Binaural Nodar team will carry out a set of sound interviews and photographic recordings with former and current emigrants from various villages in the civil parish of Côta, with particular attention to aspects related to “migrant sensibility”, that is, how the condition of shared belonging (between the place of origin and migration) is reflected in the senses (landscape, sounds, smells, music, gastronomy, objects with symbolic value, etc.). The recordings made will be part of with the documentation produced in different locations and countries and will be presented at the end of the artist residency in the form of a short sound and photographic documentary.
Ana Margarida Ferreira is a young contemporary artist with family roots in the rural parish of Côta, municipality of Viseu, and she is attending the second year of the Master’s Degree in Contemporary Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro, within which, from February 2023, she will carry out an academic internship with Binaural Nodar. She has presented her polysemic work (visual arts, writing, media, sound, etc.) in the context of group exhibitions developed in an academic environment.
Liliana Silva is from Santo António, Funchal. In 2014, she finished her degree in Visual 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 concluded in 2016. Since August 2017, she has been responsible for the areas of communication and multimedia at Binaural Nodar, having developed intense activity in area of graphic design, editorial graphics, video recording and editing, exhibition design, etc.
Luís Costa is a curator of contemporary art practices, sound researcher, author, educator and cultural promoter in rural contexts. Author of numerous pieces and sound/audiovisual installations, editor and author of ethnographic and artistic books, speaker at conferences on art, sound and territory. Chairman of the Board of Binaural Nodar since 2004. 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 and social and environmental researchers from more than 20 countries. Coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, a project of research, cataloging and sound/audiovisual mapping of the collective memory from Portuguese rural territories.
José Bica (Portugal)
The project contemplates the interpretation of the theme of migration using telegram readings, exploring translations into four languages of the countries of destination of the emigration waves, coming from the villages of the parish of Côta, where the field work of the residency will be developed. The investigation of the phonetics of different languages aims at matching the sounds of soundscapes to each letter, word or phrase. This correspondence will be based on the sound similarities between the translations and soundscape samples, and will be complemented with intermittent signals – signals and soundscapes for location and movement in space. It is also considered relevant to guide documentary research, through references to the union of peoples, regardless of their cultural differences and location on the globe. Four monophonic listening points will be designed with a signal that can come from audio players. The soundscapes will be divided into mono matrices for sound spatialization using Ambisonics immersive reproduction techniques.
Since early years interested in sound, José Bica’s techniques and knowledge are not only related to sound, but as well in the manner as it propagates in the space and connects to different kinds of media, as paintings, sculpture, video, dance and theatre. His research focuses soundscape and sound effects, music production and composition, acoustic ecology, acoustics and psychoacoustics dealing with communication. The assumed interest in exploring interactivity using diverse programming environments led to focus on the use and manipulation of field recordings to produce sound pieces for installations and also for the creation of experimental poetics and textures in a musical context. In recent years José Bica worked in projects regarding documentary and fiction films in the sound department (as boom operator, sound recordist and sound designer) for television, cinema and commercials.
Sofía Balbontín (Chile)
In the beginning, the natural ecosystem that is forged by its geographic features, promoted human settlement in the region of Viseu. Nowadays, the evolution of cities has turned to a capitalist sphere redirecting its subsistence from nature to technology. The world has a new target that has resulted in the dematerialization of cities, towards an imperceptible macrostructure of information. This macrostructure provides great communication systems built by the exchange of information in the form of electromagnetic waves. It creates poles that converge in large cities, leaving behind large pieces of land in a process of voidness. Here, we understand the term “voidness” as the process of emptying in general, as also referred to the social and spatial structure of a specific location caused by emigration. The overlapping of biological and electromagnetic corridors in the area where the artist residency will be developed, reveal an inconsistency that triggers an emigration of people, attracted by the large commercial poles of Portugal. Through a process of geographical acupuncture that searches for a micro-cosmos of sounds, it would be possible to isolate this dematerialized body through the collection of spatial situations that reveal the phenomenon of voidness and drainage of people. The artistic proposal aims to generate a crossing point between the electromagnetic corridors and the echo of the silence of those empty places which were left behind in the voidness of the rural villages belonging to the civil parish of Côta, making visible these invisible dimensions.
Sofía Balbontín (Santiago, 1985) is a Chilean architect and sound artist based in Lisbon, co-director of the Resonant Spaces project and member of NLC Nucleo de Lenguaje y Creación UDLA. Her work is mainly focused on the interaction between sound and space, developing from this starting point experimental proposals around music, video, performance and installation. Sofía is a lecturer at the school of architecture Universidad de las Américas, Chile and she is currently doing a PhD in Performative Arts at the University of Lisbon.
Binaural Nodar is a cultural organization supported by the Portuguese Government – Culture | General- Directorate for the Arts.