These transformations form a complex and overlapping mesh of realities. There is no before and after. The ancestral ways of living in rural areas (still) coexist with new uses of the landscape, with new activities and priorities. The abandonment process, which is reflected in several dimensions (job opportunities, infrastructures, cultural production, social cohesion, visibility in the media), leaves rural communities with a weakened sense of identity. On the other hand, the agrarian paradigm, which has always been central to the history and social fabric of these rural communities, is at a point of irremediable evanescence, and the guardians of that memory are quickly disappearing.
All these factors form a fertile ground for contemporary artistic production that is able to question and problematize, through sensitive mechanisms, the contradictions of these times of accelerated change in the rural world. It shouldn’t be forgotten that rural communities are endowed with creativity and an imaginative potential that many are unaware of.
The decision made in 2006 to establish an artist residency program in rural context was, firstly motivated by the awareness of the importance of the transformation process described above, secondly by the willingness of Binaural Nodar artists to start a rooting process in the territory, based on an everyday life experience with local communities and, thirdly, by the perception that the hosting of artists and researchers from abroad allows a rich contribution of ideas and expressions relevant to any specific rural context.
In March 2006, Binaural Nodar’s Artist Residency Program officially started and began to host sound, visual, intermedia, performing artists from all over the world. The first residency to be hosted was by Spanish musician and performer Nilo Gallego who developed an open space musical project “Sound action with a shepherd, goats, dog, musician and audience”.
In September 2006, in collaboration with the Estonian cultural organization MoKS, the second edition of the Pushing the Medium symposium took place, an international meeting of about 20 artists from different artistic areas who presented works that privileged a relationship with the territory. The program of Pushing the Medium # 2 symposium included the development of short-term projects carried out as part of an artist residency in the village of Nodar, conferences and artist talks at a university and performance events in the Portuguese cities of Guarda and Viseu, as well as a final presentation of the projects in the village of Nodar.
In the following years, over 150 artists were hosted by Binaural Nodar’s artist residency program, promoting a deep involvement between artists, geographic spaces and rural communities. An encounter between different ways of living, conceiving and translating the world, which is not merely instrumental (in the sense of simply collecting “documentation” for the development of the art work) but rather something organic, which is built naturally over the course of the project duration, which is based on a daily and communicative experience. The artist we welcome is, by definition, the one who takes on the challenge or risk of working with new contexts, who adapts to unknown circumstances in direct social contact, adapting, reconfiguring and problematizing languages, materials and aesthetic approaches.
Since 2010, Binaural Nodar Artist Residency Program has defined aggregating themes for the art projects hosted each year, having worked already on issues such as river landscapes, voicespaces, rural architecture, religion, mobility in rural contexts, relationship with the animal world and others.
