LISTENING, TOUCHING & IMAGINING BLACK CLAY
Artist Residency
Ana Carucci (Argentina)
19 August – 7 September 2025
Ribolhos (Castro Daire, Portugal)
A co-production between Binaural Nodar and the Municipality of Castro Daire, through its Municipal Library and the Civil Parish Union of Mamouros, Alva and Ribolhos. An artist residency part of Tramontana Network project, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme, including mountain-based partners from Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Romania, Abania and Poland.
The things / that can be used and are not used, / that are waiting in living rooms, / in studios, in bedrooms, / are quieter and deeper / that the others. / […] / The sword / that has killed no one / is more terrible / that the sword / that has killed.
From the poem Things.
[…] Now that I am blind, I keep dreaming tigers, but now the dream is troubled, incoherent. The tiger appears to me, but it is made of wood or plaster; or else, I am the one who dreams, but in a strange way—as if the dreamed tiger were dreaming me.
From the poem Dreamtigers.
Extracts from The Maker, 1960 by Jorge Luis Borges
During her artist residency in Ribolhos, Ana Carucci will develop a body of work that intertwines ceramics, sound, and material memory, taking as a starting point the ancient technique of black clay and its deep connection to the natural environment. This project emerges from a desire to engage in dialogue with a living tradition through her contemporary practice, with the intention of creating pieces that defy fixed categories.
Ana Carucci will build a series of ceramic objects that function as possible instruments, sculptures, or both at once. Pieces that produce sound, suggest utility, or contradict it; that activate a poetic space between the functional and the useless, the everyday and the symbolic. The core of this exploration lies in the tension between functionality and evocation. Some pieces will have whistles, while others will include grooves, textures, hollows, and vibrating bodies, similar to friction idiophones, to explore faint, dry, rough, sharp, or resonant sounds. She will also record field sounds from the surroundings and the creative process, later combining them with those produced by the pieces to compose a sonic and material atmosphere.
The artist is particularly interested in how Ribolhos’ black ceramics transformed when plastic irrupted suddenly to replace them, shifting from serving concrete needs to becoming vessels for representation, storytelling, and symbolism. From this change, she wants to consider objects as forms in which the rules of use expand, blur, and overlap. This transition from the functional to the symbolic allows her to explore other ways of relating to objects, more open, sensitive, and alive.
The central drive of Ana Carucci’s work lies in the relationship between nature and culture, and in this project, that intersection takes shape: clay as a living material full of history, and her perspective as a sensitive lens filtered through the present. Ana Carucci is drawn to what might emerge in this dialogue between her tactile experience with the material, the memory of this practice, what she will find, what she will bring with her, what she will dream while working.
Ana Carucci is an artist from Argentina currently based in Spain. She engages with painting, drawing and sound by creating installation art, music and soundscapes. Her artworks arise from exploring the in-betweenness of abstraction and literality, playing with language and the memory of senses. Nature and its relationship with culture is an ongoing theme of her artistic practice. In 2022 Ana Carucci was part of the AADK Spain residency program and the Countdown Grabowsee residency in Berlin, Germany. In 2024, she participated in “The singing of Springs” artist residency programme at Binaural Nodar. Her work Notebook 1 was selected by the Visual Arts Fund from Argentina for its national prize in 2017.
Binaural Nodar is a cultural organization supported by the Portuguese Republic – Culture, Youth, and Sports | Directorate-General for the Arts.