AVEIRO INSTANTE DISTANTE
An album by Rui Costa
Binaural Nodar announces the release on Soundcloud of the album “Aveiro, Instante Distante” by Rui Costa.
The experience that a tourist has of a city is largely determined by the randomness of impressions at the limit of consciousness, a permanent mapping between what is seen and desires, preconceived ideas, memories, etc. “Aveiro, Instante Distante” followed a mental process as a starting point for the artistic creation.
The sound recording of a city, such as Aveiro (Portugal), that was visited for the first time, incorporated this mental process in a very evident way. When recording the sound environment of the place, a lot about the subject is also captured: decisions about where to go, which places to avoid, how long to stay in a place, how fast to walk, preconceived ideas of what you want to record, etc.
The registration began in the summer of 2010 with a “sound tourism” phase. With the help of a tour guide, the routes that could be followed and recorded with the help of a pair of binaural microphones were defined. Along the way, impressions, moods, mental associations and decisions were recorded. This information was later used to create a score or a series of instructions that served for the second phase of the work, a multichannel sound installation, presented between August 18th and 28th 2010 at Estúdio Performas in Aveiro (Portugal), titled “Sightseeing for the blind in Aveiro”.
Thirteen years later, the initially recorded sound material was revisited and, in the light of the diffuse impressions of a distant moment, a spatio-temporal separation that introduced new layers of meaning, linked to memory and the reconfiguration of the idea of the city of Aveiro itself, a stereo sound piece was composed, which Binaural Nodar is now publishing in the form of a digital album.
“Aveiro, Instante Distante” is also a tribute to a city that has been continuously present in the recent history of Binaural Nodar, namely through the partnership, established in the same year of 2010, with the Masters in Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro. Over these 13 years, a collective artistic reflection has been carried out on the relationship between the rural landscapes of the Vouga river valley, in the Lafões region, and the city of Aveiro, the arrival point of a river loaded with memories of social, economic and symbolic flows between the mountains and the sea.
Rui Costa is a sound artist and arts programmer from Lisbon, Portugal. He is a founding member of Binaural Nodar, an arts organization created in 2004 and dedicated to the promotion of context-specific and participatory art projects in rural communities of Viseu, Portugal. Rui Costa has been performing and exhibiting his art work since 1998 and collaborating regularly with the American intermedia artist Maile Colbert. He co-edited the book “Three Years in Nodar: Context-Specific Art Practices in Rural Portugal”, published by Edições Nodar in 2011 and created many sound works presented and/or edited in multiple Portuguese and international contexts.
Binaural Nodar is a cultural organization supported by the Portuguese Government – Culture | Directorate-General for the Arts.