Ecos do Dom
From the 25th of September until the 25th of October, uruguayan anthropologist Ana Rodríguez developed a creative residency on the rural territory of Várzea de Calde (Viseu county). The year of 2020 was marked by the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the reason why Binaurals residency program was postponed to 2021. Never the less, it was still possible to conduct one artistic residency with with longtime collaborator Ana Rodríguez, which made a sequel to the project made on 2019 “Ecos do Dom”, touching on subjects connected to the universe of traditional therapeutic practices on villages of Viseu county, as well of small regions of northern Uruguay.
During her residency, a quest took place, on what remained of these practices and what they mean nowadays for the locals. Through processes that include plants, oral narratives passed through generations that lived and live on the country side, there’s a visible health reestablishment. The present work, resumes a path that started with the project “Plantas Faladas-Arquivo de memória vegetal”, which resulting exhibition found itself to be presented on Museu do Linho de Várzea de Calde until the end of 2020, being that the conclusion of the project consists on the publishing of a bilingual book called “Ecos do Dom” that includes a vastgathering of photographs that illustrate a sensory landscape, connected with said practices.
This creative residency, was included on Binaural Nodars project “Viseu Rural 2.0”, co-financed by the program Viseu Cultura of Viseu county, endorsed also by Museu do Linho de Várzea de Calde.
Ana Rodríguez was born in Montevidéu in 1975. She has lived in rural contexts while researching them since 2001, the year that she established herself in Tacuarembó, north of Uruguay. She’s an anthropologist, educated by the University of the Republic Uruguay. She has a master degree in Theory and Practice of the Creative Documentary by the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and also integrated the teaching team of the Rural Studies Center (Headquarters of Tacarembó of the University of the Republic of Uruguay) from 2016 until 2018. Rodríguez has created audiovisual teaching materials on gender and rural contexts for the Faculty of Agronomy of Uruguay (2016), a CD on traditions mixed with soundscapes (Los cuentos de Mamá Carolina, 2013), the Sound Map of Uruguay (2016), and since 2013 has been anartist and investigator, collaborating with Binaural Nodar. Ana Rodríguez has been working with memory, sound and orality in rural contexts, namely through her project Sound Map of Uruguay, and on this occasion her intervention addressed traditional practices linked to individual and communitarian care and health, which were transformed over time, yet still subsisting in rural areas of countries such as Portugal and Uruguay.