ECHOES OF LEAVING AND RETURNING
Artist Residency
June 5th – 17th, 2023
Municipality of Vouzela
With: Lucía Chamorro (Uruguay), Ricardo Arbiza (Uruguay), Riikka Haapasaari (Finland), Silvia Angles (Argentina)
Organization: Binaural Nodar, in partnership with the Municipality of Vouzela and the Vocational School of Vouzela
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 Municipality of Vouzela, will host the third artist residency of its 17th annual program in soud and media arts residencies, in the context of which three artistic projects will be developed that reflect and express aspects related to historical or current migration processes existing in the municipality of Vouzela.
Lucía Chamorro & Ricardo Arbiza (Uruguay)
Lucía Chamorro and Ricardo Arbiza propose a creation and research project based on listening to the sound environment of the Vouzela area, focusing on the cultural value of migration movements. The artists will work from the creation of sound, audiovisual records, and having conversations with inhabitants, to later propose reflections about diversity, cultural heritage, and listening practices. For Lucía and Ricardo, working in the area of sound art is challenging since one is immersed in a predominantly visual culture. But listening is a fundamental tool when we want to know and value the history and cultural heritage of a community. The process and result could be shared in different ways according to the generated materials. This could have the form of virtual and physical installation, sound maps, audiovisual material, texts, interactive web pages, among others.
Lucía Chamorro is a sound artist, who has worked on several soundscape research projects in contexts where diverse cultures, generations, nationalities, religions, social classes, memories, and professional activities coexist. From the diversity of cultural contributions arise manifestations such as Flamenco, in Andalusia (Spain) where she is developing an ongoing project, in which she searches for flamenco sounds while wandering around the city of Granada. In 2013 Lucía Chamorro worked on the project Paisaje Sonoro de la Laguna de Rocha, a protected area in Uruguay, with a great richness of flora and fauna, where families who work around artisanal fishing, park rangers, people who used to live in the city and “silence” coexist.
Ricardo Arbiza is an interdisciplinary artist, moved by the desire to create new experiences, being able to weave all the invisible spatial layers between human interaction and its physical context. As a performer-composer, he’s been working in creative ways to engage with the audience through the cyber-physical space such as Arduino, Raspberry Pi, web browser, phone applications, JavaScript libraries, machine learning, VR experiences, vinyl records, cassette tapes, and the use of acoustic and electroacoustic instruments. Presently, and in conjunction with the New York University, Ricardo Arbiza is working as a researcher in a project called: “Recovery and historical reconstruction of the soundscape of the former Frigorífico (Meatpacking) Anglo”, denominated the world kitchen during WWII. There, the project’s team seek to understand the historical, economic, and social events of “the landscapes of industrial revolution” in Uruguay, through the lens of both current and historical sounds.
Riikka Haapasaari (Finland)
Riikka Haapasaari proposes to explore how migratory processes change the cultural fabric and the acoustics of the landscape end environment of where migration happens, and approach this from the viewpoints of sound and matter. When something or someone leaves or is taken away, a space, be it literal of figurative remains – at least for a moment. It might be refilled later on but for the moment it changes the (literal or figurative) acoustics of the place. The artist will work with locals in finding these kinds of places and work on an audio-visual piece that is inspired by or makes visible the changing landscape, perhaps examining the agency of these places and landscapes.
Riikka Haapasaari is an artist and a filmmaker working with light and time in a quest to narrate the invisible and intangible. She is currently focusing on how the agency of materials such as glass can generate different and curious points of view into what it means to be a human. Presently working in the area between craft, cinema, and fine art, Haapasaari has a background in glass and has been developing ways to integrate traditional craft processes such as glassmaking into the production of moving image projects. In 2021 Haapasaari received a PhD from the University of Sunderland, and before that an MA from the Royal College of Art (2014), and a BA from the Aalto University (2012). Haapasaari shows her work globally in exhibitions and festivals. She represented Finland in the European Glass Context in 2021 with Light Keeper, an experimental feature film she produced in 2020. The feature recently also received an Honorable Mention at the Experimental Forum (2021), won the experimental film category in the Polish International Film Festival (2020), and Haapasaari was nominated in the Best Director category for her work with Light Keeper at the Alternative Film Festival Toronto (2020).
Silvia Angles (Argentina)
As the granddaughter of a Catalan and a Czech immigrant, and the great-granddaughter of Italian and Swiss immigrants, Silvia Angles grew up in a family context where migration processes have left their profound mark. Nostalgia is perhaps a distinctive feature that has impacted thousands of Argentine families. If today it is possible to perpetuate something of that mixed heritage, the practice of “ancestral cuisine” is one that unites different generations and traditions. Many of the recipes of immigrant grandmothers and grandfathers have been incorporated into recipe books that families preserve as a precious heritage, ones where the initial ‘nostalgia’ can now be transformed into joy. This project deals with the documentation of cooking recipes and the sound recording of both the description of the recipes by local residents of the Vouzela area and the sounds produced when cooking and sharing the meals, The recorded documentation will have a subsequent setting for artistic purposes.
Silvia Angles is a pianist and experimentalist from Río Tercero, Córdoba (Argentina) and she has been working in the field of contemporary music, participating as a musician and also organizing music cycles and meetings. In recent years, among other projects and with the pseudonym ´sianglés´, she has produced several conceptual sonomontages – some with video versions -, and forms the free improvisation duo AK (Angles-Kaegi) where, in addition to piano and trumpet, they use voice, objects, field recordings, samples and processes. Silvia Angles is also working on a project for the study and recording of soundscapes intitled “La Vida Que Sueno” (“The Life That I Sound”).