Bordering ruralities

An artistic residency by Jorge Pascual and Luís Costa, held in eight places bordering the city of Viseu: Pascoal, Abraveses, Santiago, Rio de Loba, Ranhados, Repeses, Orgens and Campo. The field work carried out, in the context of a creative project that from now on is entitled “Bordering Ruralities”, brought together poetic texts, chronicles, photography, video, soundscapes and orality, with the aim of constructing various formats of presentation, to be published soon.

“The project arose from an interest in collaborating and adding to this collaboration with Luís Costa our different origins and also our specific artistic development. Objects or customs belonging to city dwellers sometimes disappear momentarily, only to reappear in a second life or with other owners; This was the beginning of my project “Hiking Peripheries” San Sebastián / Donostia 2019 funded by the Deputation of Culture of Guipúzcoa, and it was the background to start this new collaboration, albeit with a different perspective, in which two persons walk with their own look from the rural towards the urban. Walking has become something exceptional and talking about walking is a proposal to return to slowness, and is also a social and political response to the transformations that occur in our ways of life.” (Jorge Pascual)

“Where do you draw the line between what is a city and what is already something else? What specificities can the rural arc of an interior city like Viseu have? How has the landscape of this rural/urban frontier changed over time? What can the senses detect about life in these places, which today are in transition? ”These questions result from almost twenty years of personal observations in rural areas of the Viseu region, associated with collections and creative projects carried out/hosted by Binaural Nodar, feeling a slow but constant evanescence of the more traditional rural life and its replacement gradually by new generations and by their ways of life, no longer (so) based on food production, which ends up modifying the very landscape of places. The collaboration with Jorge Pascual turns out to be a way of proposing an external perspective, of someone used to thinking and creating from “oblique views”. He is the one who arrives from the outside and who sees things that, often, the locals seem to no longer detect, due to the force of day-to-day habits.” (Luis Costa)

Jorge Pascual is a Spanish poet and actor born in 1981, of Leonese origin, but with roots in the El Bierzo area (Castilla y León) and residing for several years in San Sebastián. He published the poems “Morir de Viento” (ed. Leteo, 2001, Manual de Ultramarinos, 2015) and “Caminan las nubes descalzas”. He is also the author of the book “Me Compras Unas Alas o Me Haces Una Fiesta”, honorable mention in the Poetry Prize Eugenio de Nora (2006). More recently, he has published two expanded poems based on walks: “El viento is written” (2018) and “Periferias Caminadas” (2022). He regularly participates in multidisciplinary scenic projects such as the Free Jazz improvisation exercise “Jaula 13” with Ildefonso Rodriguez and the collaboration with La Pequeña Victoria Cen in the poetic circus show “Gigante”, among others.

Luís Costa (1968). Curator of contemporary artistic practices, researcher and sound artist, educator and cultural animator in a rural context, in the context of the Binaural Nodar association. Coordinator of Lafões Cult Lab, a multimedia artistic research concept in the territory of Viseu Dão Lafões which has already welcomed more than 150 sound/media artists and social and environmental researchers from more than 20 countries. Coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, a research project, cataloging and sound and audiovisual mapping of the collective memory of the association’s rural territories. In 2011, he co-edited the catalog and double CD “Three Years in Nodar: Artistic Practices in a Specific Context in Rural Portugal”, edited in 2017 the book + documentary “Várzea de Calde: A Linen Woven Village” and in 2023 the book “Dançar with the Root: Documenting the Memory of the Folkloric Ranches of Castro Daire”. Luís Costa is also the author of two books + CD created as a result of sound education projects: “Memória Sonora da Cortiça” with the participation of children from primary schools in the municipality of Santa Maria da Feira, together with companies and workers in the cork sector and “São Pedro do Sul: Novas Escutas Rurais” based on recordings made by young people from São Pedro do Sul in the county’s rural villages.