Luís Costa (2012)

Gilberto & Norberto

Synopsis:

In a far-off primary school in the Portuguese Beira-Alta mountains of seventy years ago, a friendship was forged between two boys from two nearby villages, in the essentiality of frugal times, made of freedom and landscape, crusts of moldy corn bread, ragged clothes, nests, corporal punishment, and lessons impregnated with the force of a pointer written on a small blackboard.

In memory of Gilberto Henriques. Sounds and interviews recorded in the villages of S. Martinho das Moitas, Nodar and Sequeiros, April 2012

Luís Costa was hosted in 2012 in the context of “Sound and Rural Architecture” artist residency cycle, fully dedicated to artist interventions around sonic characteristics and evocations of built structures.

Biography:

Luís Costa (Nodar, Portugal, 1968) is a sound art curator and organizer, experimental filmmaker, sound recordist and archiver. He is a founding member and currently the president of Binaural Nodar, an organization that since 2006 manages Lafões Cult Lab, a space devoted to sound and media arts in rural context located in a Portuguese rural area. Having a long standing interest in the new media arts (since 1991), Luís Costa has been a regular collaborator of contemporary arts and rural development magazines ([up]arte, Revista Aldeia, Boa União etc.). Since 2008 Luis Costa curated several exhibitions at galleries and museums, all connected with the creative work hosted aby Binaural Nodar. Since 2008 he coordinates “Aldeias Sonoras” (“Sound Villages”) project, an educational program that consists in the sound mapping of Portuguese rural areas with the participation of primary and secondary school students. With this project it was already possible to map sounds from more than 200 rural locations in Portugal. Luis Costa is also the coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, an holistic archive of ethnography, oral tradition, field recordings and ethnomusicology, all connected with the rural villages of Viseu Dão Lafões region in Portugal. In 2011 he directed “Where is the source of my Paiva?”, an experimental sound/video documentary about the Paiva river, that was presented during Paivascapes #1 Festival. In the same year, he published on Edições Nodar a field recordings CD along with Jez Riley French and Joana Silva, entitled “Sonata for Clarinet & Nodar” and co-edited the retrospective catalog and double CD “Three Years in Nodar: Context-Specific Art Practices in Rural Portugal”.