ECHOES OF LEAVING AND RETURNING
Cycle of community encounters
November 20th to December 15th, 2022
Castro Daire and Zermatt (Switzerland)
Organisation: Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Castro Daire Municipal Library (Municipality of Castro Daire), within the scope of the memory on Wheels project.
From the end of the 19th century to the present, millions of Portuguese emigrated, looking for alternatives to poverty, to a subsistence economy and/or to the lack of job opportunities. As such, emigration is simultaneously part of the memory and present of the Portuguese rural regions. In each village, multiple thematic layers coexist that relate to the different waves of emigration, those more distant in time, to Brazil, Venezuela, the United States of America, etc. or those more recent, to European countries such as France, Germany, Switzerland or Luxembourg.
In the same way, many rural areas today welcome people from the various continents, in a process opposite to that of so many Portuguese, those who emigrated, those who returned and those who preferred not to return.
However, there is an infinite range of topics that it is possible to delve into when contacting with former and current migrants and their descendants, such as architecture, economics, language, the sense of belonging and cultural insertion of those who emigrated and of their descendants, the perceptions about the evolution of places of destination and origin, the type of connection with the rural world, family narratives and document records, the symbology and the semiotics of affection, gastronomy and many others.
Binaural Nodar, in collaboration with the Municipal Library of Castro Daire will develop, between November 20th and December 15th, a first cycle of community encounters with former and current emigrants in Switzerland, which will take place, simultaneously, in the Municipal Library of Castro Daire and in the town of Zermatt, Switzerland, a locality that constitutes an authentic stronghold of Castro Daire, such is the number of countrymen who lived and still live there.
This cycle of community encounters is part of the Memory on Wheels project, a joint initiative Binaural Nodar and the Municipal Library of Castro Daire, which, since 2019, has been developing actions of audiovisual collections and parallel activities (workshops, multimedia exhibitions, performances, etc.), associated with a digital archived designed to catalog and disseminate the collected documentation (https://memoria-sobre-rodas.org).
Binaural Nodar is a professional cultural organization co-financed with biennial support from the General Directorate of Arts.