Antony Lyons & Anne Burke

“Sacred Ways” takes as its starting point the notion of ritual journeys or pilgrimages that are integral to religious practice all over the world. From larger scale mass pilgrimages to the local journeys to and from places of worship, shrines or places of personal/intimate (or even “superstitious”) significance, sacred paths have religious and spiritual importance, connecting cultures to the landscape, and connecting places in a mesh of meaning and myth. “Sacred Ways” will explore some of the sonic associations with religious practice in the Gralheira area.The fieldwork may include visits to places of worship, cemeteries, shrines, holy wells, trees, rocks or other sacred sites located in the landscape. Particular attention will be devoted to the actions and rituals that may form part of the journeys to these locations – for example, particular ways of crossing sites or chosen routes that have particular personal meaning. The project will result in a series of sound-essays and performative installations, which will emerge from accompanying groups and individuals to key sites, recording voices of local people, talking about the significance of particular sites, recording the soundscape of particular sites and ritual pathways overtime, through setting up a number of autonomous microphones, and editing and layering of recording with visual material.

Anthony Lyons’ work as a media and environmental artist concentrates on weaving together strands of archival investigation, landscape-based fieldwork and environmental engagement. In recent years he has applied the descriptive terms “deep mapping” and “geopoetics” to his practice. Lyons is an associate of the PLaCE Research Centre, Bristol and a member of the international network, Mapping Spectral Traces. The concepts of journeying and place-making have been central to Anne Burke’s work as a photographer and ethnographer, through the exploration of different aspects of the connections between language, visual culture and walking as an everyday practice of life. An Emphasis on ethnographic / oral history field-methods has been a central part of her research, including in her current work exploring the embodied nature of perception with visually impaired collaborators. As part of a collaborative project with three other artists she recently completed a 400-mile rowed journey by sea, following the route taken by 7th century Irish monks from the west coast of Ireland to the Scottish isle of Iona. Burke is a lecturer in photography at the University of Middlesex and is fluent in Portuguese.