Rui Silveira

Abrigo

In a region where the traditional architecture has suffered enormous changes–as a result of new materials and building techniques, and the importing of foreign architectonical models–we often feel that there is a different time surrounding some buildings that still keep their original characteristics. These buildings, many of which were abandoned in recent years, being more than simple shelters, had an essential value in families’daily lives.These extinct gestures and actions still echo inits stone walls.They are memories sprung from empty rooms, recollections of the inhabitants who still remember them living, objects left behind that tell us stories.

We can say that there is a different time inside these houses, a time indifferent to our presence, indifferent to the present, a time that speaks tous about territorial identity, about a very particular way of building and inhabiting it, which, by way of its materials,connects it self with the landscape in an almost mimetic way. Starting from recollections of the inhabitants’ memories and recordings of the overall environment, an hybrid audiovisual piece appeared, which relates to a documentarian approach and to a more experimental language around the sonic universe of the two major materials used for building houses–the stone and the wood.

In “Abrigo” (“shelter”) my aim was to make an experimental analogy with a documentary I had made using footage shot in Labé, Guinea-Conakry,centred on the process of building a house using the local resources, local techniques and local manpower, in an chaotic urban environment of acommunity with a strong identity.

Initially I was more interested in the experimental angle, especially exploring sound separately from image. Its documental facet appeared as a need to respond to the curiosity from the community. The dual projection,with two parallel screens, can show much more in less time (it evendoubles the duration) and intends to balance the experimental side with the documental side.

Rui Silveira was born in Campo Maior in 1983 and presently lives in Lisbon. He holds a BSc in Communication Design by the Fine Arts Faculty of Lisbon and even though his formative years have been devoted to graphic design, he always tried to focus his work to wards an audiovisual practice. The possible relationships between sound and image (video or photography) have captured his interesting since the beginning. He participated with his own pieces in the Collision Festival (London) and in Rencontres Internationales (Paris).