Niklas Nybom & Jan Kühling

Vougascapes

“Nadando” (“Swimming”) is an artistic exercise loaded with irony, which emerged from an unlikely connection: the fact that the company that owns the Ribeiradio / Ermida dam in the Vouga river, EDP Electricidade de Portugal, SA, is owned by the Chinese company Three Gorges Corporation, whose name derives directly from the gorges of the Yangtze River. A poem about this river by Mao Zedong, in Portuguese, was proposed to be read by local tourists visiting the Ribeiradio dam, thus creating the basis for the final work. Niklas Nybom & Jan Kühling were hosted in 2016 in the context of Vougascapes artist residency cycle, fully dedicated to artist interventions around the landscape and communities of the Vouga river in central Portugal.

Niklas Nybom graduated in musicology from the University of Åbo (Finland), becoming a student in the master program of theatrical sound design in the University of Helsinki. In the last few years, he has worked as a sound designer, musician and composer for several professional theatrical productions.

Jan Kühling is a young german/polish investigator, who graduated in cultural studies, the atrical direction and applied theater studies from the University of Giessen (Germany). Nowadays, he’s working on his doctoral dissertation on the theme of Media Ecology for the Theatrical Arts and Media Institute of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Polónia).