SALOMON CAROLY
“Before the Bridge”
Artist Residency
Between April and June 2023, Binaural Nodar hosted, as part of an Erasmus+ internship, French artist Salomon Caroly, student at ÉSAD – Grenoble -Valence.
Among various activities, Salomon Caroly developed an artist residency that culminated in the sound work “Coule, le béton”.
The overlapping of epochs and generations is remarkable in the Vouzela area. From prehistoric stone, to the Romanic 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 he 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 “reality”.
In Vouzela, there is a place that particularly attracts the artist: the river Zela, especially the portion between the Romanic bridge and a huge willow tree. This feeling leads Salomon to think that rivers existed before all human activities. They are the ones who, due to the vital water resource they represent, saw villages born 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 river Alfusqueiro and the A25 motorway, next to 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 begins his artistic work with sound, working with the matter “river”, since it was precisely the sound of the river that touched him most deeply.
Salomon Caroly was born in the city of Grenoble (France), located at the foot of the Alpine mountain ranges, and he is a young visual artist who is currently finishing his Masters in Art at the École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Grenoble, carrying out a three-month Erasmus+ internship at Binaural Nodar. Salomon Caroly considers himself curious, passionate about nature and the mountains, to where he usually escapes, having worked in analogue photography, drawing, writing and book production, in projects that can assume quite different forms.
Audiovisual recording and editing by Ana Margarida Ferreira.
Binaural Nodar is a cultural structure supported by the Portuguese Government – Culture | General-Directorate for the Arts.