BACK TO THE PAIVA RIVER
Presentation of artistic projects

Saturday, September 30 at 16h00
Pedestrian bridge over the River Paiva
Reriz – VIla Nova (Castro Daire)

A production by Binaural Nodar in partnership with Amaneï Salina, the Municipality of Castro Daire, the Union of Parishes of Reriz and Gafanhão, the Parish of Pinheiro and Mapa sonoro de Uruguay.

Two artists, Vittoria Assembri and Luis Costa, spent the last two weeks in the villages of Reriz and Vila Nova, situated on opposite banks of the River Paiva. Both recorded sounds of the landscape, collected short stories from the inhabitants, questioned what their ancestors’ daily lives were like in the past and how the presence of the river influences their lives today and how they perceive the flow that circulates between them: as something that unites or as something that divides? At the same time, on the other side of the Atlantic, Uruguayan anthropologist Ana Rodríguez followed the footsteps and sounds collected on the banks of the Paiva River from a distance, making connections and asking questions.

Vittoria Assembri
River orchestra for a future rurality

Vittoria Assembri’s work aims to create a future rural setting from a set of voices, everyday gestures and other visible and invisible elements, human and non-human: speeches, songs, short stories, calls, verses, crops, objects and materials. This multivocal orchestra, recorded between the two villages of Reriz and Vila Nova and spread across both banks of the river, is not a nostalgic testimony to rurality, but rather an active and critical space from which it is possible to imagine new speculative narratives and a new collective memory of the future rural river.

Luís Costa and Ana Rodríguez
River, people, work and food

Leaving the village of Nodar, and more than a decade after having traveled extensively along the Paiva River, from its source to its mouth, we arrived in Reriz and VIla Nova, sister villages of the mother river. Bearing in mind many stories heard in the past about the communities’ relationship with the river, we realized that no two places are the same, that each village creates its own oral book of tales about everyday life, made up of people gone and people now living, of immense work and the endless search for food. The sound work is the result of a joint reflection by Luís Costa, who has lived the daily life of Reriz and Vila Nova, and Ana Rodríguez, who was preparing to travel to a lost place in the north of Uruguay: Rincón de Paiva. The same Paiva, a transatlantic brotherhood lost in time that can perhaps still be understood through the senses.

This artistic residency is part of the ‘Fresh water, salt water’ cycle, a cooperation project between Binaural Nodar (Viseu Dão Lafões, Portugal) and Amaneï Salina (Aeolian Islands, Italy).

Binaural Nodar is a cultural organization supported by the Portuguese Government – Culture | Directorate-General for the Arts.