Ana Rodríguez (2019)

Spoken plants: A vegetable memory archive

Synopsis:

Since their birth, the inhabitants of Portuguese rural villages have been introduced to a series of relationships through which they obtain food, clothing and shelter; they symbolize the strongest transitions in their vital journey, they transform their own surroundings with works and tools, they take care of and graft domesticated and wild plants, they sow chosen seeds, in vegetable gardens and in plowed lands; they shroud altars and homes; they ask for protection against storms, they energize and purify with vapors, fumes and baths; they play with fibers, wood, fruits and flowers, building themselves and their place in the world.

Throughout 2019, a series of interviews were conducted in the villages of Várzea de Calde and Cabrum with men and women who were born between the 1930s and the 1990s, with the aim of talking about the various existing links with the plant world, which have developed over time. Starting from this objective, a series of sound excerpts were published and are now available to the public. These are part of a plot that we call an archive, in which, through digital technology, individual, family and collective memories rooted in the same territory are related.

The project “Spoken plants: A vegetable memory archive” started precisely from the concept of archive, reflecting on the possible combination of a catalog of archived documents and the evocative presence of material elements: plants, images and sounds linked to plants and their local uses.

This exhibition that concludes the project is dedicated to those who slept on rye straw mattresses, to those who wore and wear some linen clothes, to those who think about what they eat, to those who choose what they eat or eat what they can, to all those who have sweated and avoid sleeping to produce food for their family and animals, those who keep a tool or a piece of furniture made by a relative, those who were cold, who wear clogs, who built their own toys, those who were moved by contemplating a landscape they inhabit, who stole a flower or do not forget an aroma.

Special thanks go to António Santos, Emília Bernardino, Herculano Gonçalves, Isabel Filipe, Joaquim Gaspar, Laura Filipe, Leonel Oliveira, Lorena Vicente, Lúcia Ferreira, Manuela Correia, Maria Cidália Santos, Mariana Campos, Mariyam Ali, Miquelina Campos, Virgínia Maurício and all the support provided by the team of the Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde, as well as the magnificent welcome from the community of Cabrum.

Biography:

Ana Rodríguez (b. 1975) was born in Montevideo, has lived and researched in rural contexts since 2001, the year she settled in Tacuarembó, in northern Uruguay. She is an anthropologist graduated from the University of the Republic of Uruguay, attended the Masters in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was part of the pedagogic team of the Rural Studies Nucleus (Tacuarembó Delegation of the University of the Republic of Uruguay) and between 2016 and 2018 she created audiovisual teaching materials on gender and rurality for the Faculty of Agronomy of Uruguay (2016), a CD of oral tradition stories with soundscapes (Los cuentos de Mamá Carolina, 2013), created the Sound Map of Uruguay (2016), and since 2013 she has been an artist and researcher at Binaural Nodar.