Coule, le béton

The overlapping of eras and generations is remarkable in the Vouzela area. From prehistoric stone, to the Roman bridge, to medieval fortifications, to churches and old houses, to modernity with its concrete buildings and gloomy warehouses. Of course, this overlap exists everywhere, but for Salomon Caroly it is more visible here than where it comes from (Grenoble, France).

Through his work, the artist is interested in places that could be called “liminal”, places that seem to be outside of time and space, places that produce some additional echoes in the imaginary of what we call real.

In Vouzela, there is a place that particularly attracts the artist: the river Zela, especially the portion between the Roman bridge and the weeping willow. This feeling leads Salomon to think that rivers existed before all these human activities. They are the ones who, due to the vital water resource they represent, saw the birth of villages on its shores, saw bridges rise, and much later saw the motorway (a kind of river) emerge in the territory, as is symbolically evident in the crossing between the Alfusqueiro river and the A25 motorway, near Cambra. In a way, it was the river that shaped the landscape as we know it today. Furthermore, we can note that Vouzela owes its toponym to its location on the crossing of two rivers: Vouga and Zela and that the municipality is crossed by other tributaries of the Vouga river, such as the Couto river or Alfusqueiro river.

With “Before the bridge”, Salomon Caroly starts her artistic work with sound, working with the material “river”, since it was precisely the sound of the river that touched her most deeply.

Salomon Caroly was born in the city of Grenoble (France), located at the foot of the Alpine massif, being a young visual artist who is currently finishing his Master in Art at the École Supérieure d’Art et Designde Grenoble, doing a three-month Erasmus+ internship at Binaural Nodar . Salomon Caroly considers himself curious, passionate about nature and the mountains, where he usually escapes, having worked in analogue photography, drawing, writing and book production, in projects that can take on quite different forms.