SOUND FOREST – A MORNING OF SENSITIVE LISTENING
Workshop led by Luís Costa and Liliana Silva
February 23rd – 12h30am-01h20pm | Vouzela Secondary School
In partnership with ISPUP/FlorestFM Project and the Municipality of Vouzela

Students from Vouzela Secondary School
on a specific day and in a specific place, with trees all around.
Bodies and minds coming from different contexts,
with necessarily specific listenings.

What does it mean to listen to the world around us?
What sounds do we give more importance to?
How do we endure silence?
Is collective listening possible?

We’ll set out on a double discovery, interior and exterior.

1. Carrying an imaginary picnic basket of sounds in our hands, we will slowly search for spaces and collect as many sound possibilities as we can. Listen close, listen far, touch, experience contact with forest materials (stones, sticks, branches, trunks, leaves, feet, hands, etc.), listen to what we touch, listen to what others touch, try to listen to what no one has heard yet. One, two, five, fifty. Slow tempo, insistence…

2. Three sound recorders and several microphones will be available. When participants decide they have heard enough, they will invent a route and record some of the sounds they have identified or some of the activations that interested them the most.

3. After recording, they will put down the recorder and think of a distant memory of sound and forest. A picnic with your parents or grandparents in the village, etc. They will try to think of as many details of this memory as possible, walking through the space.

4. When one of the recorders is available again, they will record the voice of this memory of sound and forest, as they wish. Standing still, walking, in a word, phrase or poem. However they want.

5. When everyone feels their mission is complete, we’ll sit down and talk about whatever we like. What we felt, what we discovered, what worried us, what stimulated us.

6. And at the end, we’ll be sure that we had a wonderful time together.

Sound Forest is a sound discovery workshop in forest contexts, proposed by Binaural Nodar and part of the ForestFM project, coordinated by the Institute of Public Health of the University of Porto (ISPUP) and funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology, seeking to involve young people in promoting attitudes and behaviors favorable to fire prevention, through the design of participatory radio broadcasts (https://forestfm.ispup.up.pt/).

Binaural Nodar is a contemporary cultural project working in rural regions of Portugal in the areas of sound art and multimedia creation, audiovisual ethnographic research, digital archive management, sound education, radio creation and publications (online, books, CD, DVD). Since 2006, Binaural Nodar has hosted more than 200 artists and researchers as part of its artist residency program in a rural context, produced dozens more exhibitions, sound works and media of its own and disseminated its work in many countries in Europe, America and Asia. Binaural Nodar is an active member of two European networks dedicated to ethnographic research and sound art creation: the Tramontana Network of European rural memory archives and the SOCCOS Network of sound art residencies. Binaural Nodar’s intervention model is based on simultaneous action at an intensely local level, with rural communities, and in a global context, with activities developed in museums, universities, cultural organizations in countries such as Spain, France, Italy, England, Germany or the United States (https://www.binauralmedia.org).

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