“There is no future without the memory of past.”
Abandoned villages are aside places that modern societies tend to ignore or want to forget. They are considered to be dead and useless places, a sign of failure. They represent a past that is hopelessly forgotten. Today those villages don’t have a sense anymore.
“Cá” is a project that intends to give back a sense to the abandoned villages. The abandoned villages are places with a strong identity, they are places alive even if they are uninhabited, even if the nature has gradually absorbed them. They are still alive places full of memory. They are a bridge with the past… our past.
Today our approach with memory is more and more connected with a museological approach that understands memory as storage and not as continuation.
Memory is not deposited as a series of available data in an archive, which is easy to consult when we want. Memory is not a department store where old unusable tools now lie abandoned. Memory is something more: it is a legacy that we are called to accept, concerning the future.
“Cá” isn’t a work based on an aesthetics of ruin, is other than an intervention that proposes a way of reclaiming these abandoned places.
In March 2009, I began a journey in search of abandoned villages in the area of Maciço da Gralheira (S. Pedro do Sul), an area where I live in Portugal for about four years ago.
It was an intimate, deep, minimal, journey, sometimes marked by defeats and resignations. It was a journey that mobilized my subjectivity, which put me in discussion, which triggered questions and doubts. This journey was not so significant in my life, but it was part of it and manifested itself in the stories I heard, in what happened to me and people I managed to be with. For me these meetings were authentic revelations.
Searching a place that belongs to the past meant for me a beginning of a path towards my own origins. But searching an abandoned village is more than that. It is a journey toward death. But that does not scare me. For me, death is an experience of connection and flow with the legacy that others have left us.
Reaching these abandoned villages we immediately perceive the sense of death, but at the same time there’s something that subtly continues living and harbor us. These villages that apparently seem out of time retain signs of life. They preserve memory.
Contemporary society ignores the abandoned villages because there’s the will of removing the death of life. Nowadays, death isn’t in the everyday lives as in the archaic societies. On one hand, we want to make it disappear (we think of the vital images offered by advertising which give us an image of beauty and permanent health), on the other hand when it becomes visible, it’s so pageantry that it seems unlikely (we think of some images of newspapers and television with corpses shamelessly exposed). Probably this way of exposing death is a way to exorcise it: there is death, but it’s always from the others, it’s remote, and therefore can be seen and be tolerable.
Therefore, in our society, death is something unacceptable, something to eradicate, it’s no longer considered as a complement of life, as a flow. Possibly it’s also the reason that nowadays some investors tend do revive the abandoned villages, the “ghost villages” through tourism. For me this is very difficult to understand because the majority of the times these actions degrade or forget the essence and the silent authenticity of places.
There is the general idea that the past should always be reconstructed. No… I believe that the past is always actual, the past is always within us, the past is memory, the past is not dead as the death is not the end, it is the continuation. Therefore in “Cá” my aim was not to revive the past, but inherit it somehow. Inherit the past means to be able to make it more actual, giving it new ways, meaning continuing what others have left us and becoming witnesses of a history that must be preserved and continued.
“Cá” intend to trace, catch and interrogate the signs of life and memory where everything seems over. Tracking the signs of memory means for me to take back our roots, to reconnect us to a sense of authenticity that is being extinguished.
DESCRIPTION
“Cá” is a video installation on two screens (Cá#1, Cá#2). This installation is part of “Locus in Quo,” a multidisciplinary project about the meaning of places conceived in 2009. “Cá” combines field recordings, “extended vocal techniques” focused on the relationship between voice, soundscape and acoustic properties of places, with performance and video – art.
– “Cá#1” shows a painful “mater”, which advances solemnly with slow and silent steps through the streets of an abandoned village. When she approaches one of the village’s houses, her copper-colored hands clutching a white handkerchief, its walls begin to cry water. She arrives at a house where she finds the remains of an old crop corn, possibly one of the village’s last crops. Here she begins a ritual of a funereal lamentation. In the destructive fury of the lamentation, Maria experiences a symbolic death to give life to a new Maria who after absorbed the knowledge of the village, goes far to continue the tradition.
Straddling between paganism and christianity, the video shows an image of Maria as mourners in the act of suffer death: the death of the village, a symbol of the ancient world represented by a sheaf of corn. The video is built around a series of tableaux vivants: static poses near the doors, windows and walls of the unmanned houses that express in a clear, simple and effective way very complex contents. The aim is to highlight the present, to make it more “real.” The tableaux vivants alternate with images of the walls that ‘cry’ during the woman’s passage, they are distinct in color from that of the tableaux vivants. It’s a way to isolate these images felt “necessary” to emphasize the tragic sense of the story.
The lamentation, the ritual crying connected to the crop, is an expedient to overcome the trauma of death, to give shape to pain and to arrange memories related to the disappearance. It is a fundamental step to find the strength to go on living. Therefore the woman in pain becomes the bearer of life. The palms of her copper-colored hands testify this, in which grass continues to grow. Copper in alchemy is a symbol of life-force and of water, and alludes in this sense to the water that still flows three times a week into the village to irrigate its abandoned fields. Therefore the water that falls from the walls has two meanings: the suffering and death but also the strength and rebirth.
– “Cá#2” is a video projected on a wall composed of images that capture the present reality of an abandoned village, its desolation and abandon. The approach is analytic and detailed. The video describes what the eyes see, the superficial element… the place’s skin. A disquieting and unpredictable dimension manifests itself on a landscape where the quiet and the calm predominate, where the sound of the environment, together with the performer’s voice, intensify this feeling. The sound composition made by sounds of the performer’s voice, field recorded and captured with binaural microphones in the abandoned villages, from sounds of the abandoned villages and traditional songs of Sociedade filarmónica de Santa Cruz de Alvarenga (Arouca, Portugal) captured in the village of Parada de Ester (Castro Daire) fest.
CREDITS
Original Idea and Artistic Director: Manuela Barile
Vocal Performer and Sound Compositions: Manuela Barile
Field Recordings: Manuela Barile
Video Footage and Editing: Manuela Barile
Camera: “João Rodrigues (Portugal) e Luís Costa (Portugal)
Photos: Manuela Barile
Music: Banda Filármonica de Alvarenga (Portugal)
Sound Post Production: Rui Costa (Portugal)
Costumes: Brazukinha (Viseu, Portugal)
Artist Residency: Centro de Residências Artísticas de Nodar (Portugal)
Production: Luis Costa & Carina Martins (Binaural)
Support: Portuguese Ministry of Culture
Photos on the set of Cá
[AFG_gallery id=’112′] [AFG_gallery id=’119′]Video stills of Cá #1
[AFG_gallery id=’114′]Video stills of Cá #2
[AFG_gallery id=’116′]Exibition view “Cá” at Museu da Bienal de Cerveira, Vila Nova de Cerveira (Portugal). Photo by Maile Colbert, 2009
Cá installation view at Museu da Bienal de Cerveira, Vila Nova de Cerveira (Portugal). Photo by Carina Martins, 2009
Video stills de Cá #2
Vista da instalação “Cá” no Museu da Bienal de Cerveira, Vila Nova de Cerveira (Portugal). Foto de Maile Colbert, 2009
Vista da instalação “Cá” no Museu da Bienal de Cerveira, Vila Nova de Cerveira (Portugal). Foto de Carina Martins, 2009