ECHOES OF LEAVING AND RETURNING
Multimedia exhibition
Opening: Saturday, May 20th at 15h30
Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde, Municipality of Viseu

With: Ana Rodríguez (Uruguay), André Araújo (Portugal), Liliana Silva (Portugal), Luís Costa (Portugal), Niccolò Masini (Italy), Rafael Bresciani (Brazil/Italy).

Organization: Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde and the Civil Parish Council of Calde.

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 Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde, presents a photographic and multimedia exhibition “Ecos da Ida e do Retorno” (“Echoes of leaving and returning”) which was curated following two cycles of artist residencies that took place in September and October 2022, integrating ethnographic collections and four artistic works that express aspects related to historical or current migratory processes existing in the civil parish of Calde and, more generally, in the region of Viseu.

André Araújo (Portugal)
“Vaza e o tempo não guarda”

The young musician and multidisciplinary artist André Araújo worked on the theme of emigration from the conflict between the rural and the urban, questioning how memory, as a prerequisite of being, relates to the conflict of dreams and the real journey of workers’ experiences and how this memory works as a validator of reality, by incorporating various dialectics, between the official and the unofficial, the written and the spoken, the registered and the transmitted. The work produced by the artist, entitled “Vaza e o tempo não guarda” (“It leaks and time doesn’t keep it”), assumes the condition of an audiovisual poetic essay, having been constructed from collections made in the village of Várzea de Calde and from audiovisual documents from public archives about Portuguese emigration and about factory work.

André Araújo (Porto, 1999) is a musician, visual artist and researcher. Graduated in Jazz from the Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel (Belgium) and holding a Master in Contemporary Artistic Creation from the University of Aveiro, he is currently a PhD student in Artistic Creation from the University of Aveiro, ESMAE AND ESMAD (Porto) and ESAD.cr (Caldas da Rainha). Araújo’s body of work uses different media, from Video Art and Installation to Visual and Sound Performance, to explore the relationship between sound and image, as a tool to address social issues and themes related to memory, oppression/repression and in specific territories.

Ana Rodríguez (Uruguay), Liliana Silva (Portugal) and Luís Costa (Portugal):

The Binaural Nodar team will carry out a series of sound interviews and photographic records with former and current emigrants from the civil parish of Calde, with particular attention to aspects related to the “migrant sensoriality”, that is, to the condition of shared belonging ( between the place of origin and migration) and how it is reflected by the senses (visual and sound landscape, smells, music, gastronomy, objects with symbolic value, etc.). The recordings made will be integrated with documentation produced elsewhere (Uruguay, Brazil, Switzerland), for the creation of a final sound and visual exhibition and a series of podcasts, to be presented in the 4th quarter of 2022 and throughout 2023. .

Ana Rodríguez (b. 1975) was born in Montevideo, has lived and researched in rural contexts since 2001, the year she settled in Tacuarembó, in northern Uruguay. She is an anthropologist graduated from the University of the Republic of Uruguay, attended the Masters in Theory and Practice of Creative Documentary at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was part of the pedagogic team of the Rural Studies Nucleus (Tacuarembó Delegation of the University of the Republic of Uruguay) and between 2016 and 2018 she created audiovisual teaching materials on gender and rurality for the Faculty of Agronomy of Uruguay (2016), a CD of oral tradition stories with soundscapes (Los cuentos de Mamá Carolina, 2013), created the Sound Map of Uruguay (2016), and since 2013 she has been an artist and researcher at Binaural Nodar.

Liliana Silva (b. 1991) was born in Santo António, Funchal. In 2014, she finished her degree in Fine Arts, Multimedia Branch at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto. That same year, she joined the Master in Multimedia Communication, Interactive Multimedia Branch at the University of Aveiro, which she would conclude in 2016. Since August 2017, she has been responsible for the communication and multimedia areas at Binaural Nodar, having developed an intense activity in area of ​​graphic design, editorial graphics, video recording and editing, exhibition design, etc.

Luís Costa (b. 1968). Curator of contemporary artistic practices, sound researcher, author, educator and cultural animator in a rural context. Chairman of the board of Binaural Nodar. Coordinator of Lafões Cult Lab, an artistic research lab in the territory of Viseu Dão Lafões which has hosted over 150 sound/media artists and social and environmental researchers from over 20 countries. Coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, a research, cataloging and sound/audiovisual mapping project of the collective memory of rural territories in the Viseu region, integrated in the Tramontana Network – European network of digital archives from mountain areas.

Niccolò Masini (Italy)
“Por bem a nossa casa vem”

Multilingual video essay installation, 10′ (looped). Part of Islands of Time / location 06 – Vouzela, Portugal.


”Por bem a nossa casa vem” is a multilingual narrative composition that elaborates upon the practice of highlighting disappearances, a cultural affair mediated with nature intertwining languages and meanings of departure and return. The expression Por bem a nossa casa vem means “you are welcome in our house if you come with good intentions.” Por bem literally means for good, but in Portuguese, it communicates the sense of something done with good intentions, not something that is “done” well. In these terms, rural areas, ruins, and liminal spaces can suggest opportunities for spatial investigations and analytical languages of discourse within their territory of reference. A fixed image we conserve of a territory transforms itself into a simulacrum, a symbol of behavior and the culture depicting it. Reestablishing the discourse of using a multi- narrative language that is attentive to and aware of the symbolism implied in its formation leads towards retracing the path produced and rediscovering the point, the place of straying. In as much as memory, language plays a crucial role in forming the multilayered trama compelling territorial identity; beyond time, space, and inheritances.

Niccolò Masini (b. 1989) is an Italian multidisciplinary artist and researcher, whose recent projects revolve around the questioning of migratory, territorialization and deterritorialization processes and their representation in formal and informal archives. The artist has a degree in Animation and Illustration from the European Institute of Design – Milan (2011), a degree in Audiovisual Arts from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy of Amsterdam (2015) and holds a master’s degree in artistic research and praxis from the DAI / Dutch Art Institut of Arnhem ( 2021). Niccolò Masini’s work develops in the domains of narrative, a certain form of “handcrafted” work, poetry and anthropology.

Rafael Bresciani (Brazil/Italy)
“Mares de morros”

“Mares de morros” (“Seas of hills”) is the result of a reinterpretation of Rafael Bresciani’s audiovisual work “Caminho pro mar” (“Path to the sea”). This project, co-produced by Binaural Nodar in the context of the artist residency “Echoes of Leaving and Returning”, brings a new opportunity to rework a first version of “Caminho pro mar”, where Bresciani was inspired by the history of his family’s adventure, who migrated from Italy to Brazil, only to return to its origins after five generations.

The first version of this work has the small town of Pietrasanta, on the Tuscan coast, as a starting and ending point, and the sea as a means of expectations, fears, memory and belonging. But when in the Viseu region, located in the heart of Portugal, the sea was too far to be seen. So it was through the stories of the migrants, their families, those who stayed, those who left and those who returned that Bresciani was able to find his sea. All images and sounds used to compose the audiovisual piece were recorded in loco during the residency. The music was made by manipulating these sounds through live coding and signal feedback.

Rafael Bresciani is a sound and media artist who has gained experience in formats ranging from live performance, audio/video/media works, multi and transmedia installations and random and generative systems that control and create art manifestations. All of these practices aim to work in depth on the interaction between sound and other elements of performance art, in order to suggest a poetic vision of the relationship between perception and reality.

Credits:

Co-production Binaural Nodar and Museu do Linho de Várzea de Calde (Municipality of Viseu)
Concept and curation: Luís Costa
Design of the exhibition route: Luís Costa e Liliana Silva
Graphic design: Liliana Silva
Exhibition setup: Luís Costa e Ana Margarida Ferreira