Rui Silveira

Project: “Abrigo”
Category: Video installation
Period: April 2009
Event: Art Residency

 

In a region where the traditional architecture has suffered profound transformations – both as a result of new materials and building techniques being introduced and of the importing of foreign architectonical models – we often feel that there is a different time surrounding autochthonous buildings.Theses houses, many of which were abandoned in recent years, more than simple shelters, were essential places for the families’ daily lives. These extinct gestures and actions still echo in its stone walls. These are memories invoked throughout the empty rooms, recollections of its inhabitants who still remember the time when those rooms were filled with life. Also, the objects that were left behind tell us stories.

We could speak of a different time inside these houses, a time indifferent to our presence, indifferent to the present, a time that speaks about territorial identity, about a particular way of building and inhabiting it, by the use of materials, that connects with landscape in an almost mimetic way. From recordings of both the inhabitants’ memories and from the overall soundscape, an hybrid audiovisual object emerges. One that is both connected with a documentarian vision and with a more experimental language developed around the sonic universe of the two major materials used for building houses – the stone and the wood.

 

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A video excerpt from “Abrigo”

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Rui Silveira | Portugal

Rui Silveira was born in Campo Maior in 1983 and presently lives in Lisbon. He holds a BSc in Communication Design by the Fine Arts Faculty of Lisbon and even though his formative years have been devoted to graphic design, he always tried to focus his work towards an audiovisual practice. The possible relationships between sound and image (video or photography) have captured his interesting since the beginning. He participated with his own pieces in the Collision Festival (London) and in Rencontres Internationales  (Paris).

http://www.ruisilveira.com

 

 

Rui Silveira was born in Campo Maior in 1983 and presently lives in Lisbon. He holds a BSc in Communication Design by the Fine Arts Faculty of Lisbon and even though his formative years have been devoted to graphic design, he always tried to focus his work towards an audiovisual practice.