“Aldeias Sonoras: A Sound and Methodological Talk”
By Luís Costa
Casa das Videiras Environmental Education Centre, Lousada
May 10 at 9pm
Co-organised by Associação BioLiving and the Lousada Municipality.
We live in strange times. We proclaim ever more unquestionable values (sustainability, responsibility, solidarity, -ility, -ility, -ility), yet we forget the intimate, the subtle, the face-to-face encounter with life before it becomes consciousness and representation.
This world (even the rural one), in perpetual change, keeps devouring the possibilities of other, calmer worlds, while at the same time inducing seraphic faces of good digital conscience, whose minds often cannot bear the acrid smell of imperfect, dirty life.
Listening to our rural world. New and old listenings. What do we mean when we invoke the need to listen to this and other worlds?
The Aldeias Sonoras (Sonic Villages) project by Binaural/Nodar, begun in 2008, has brought together more than a hundred children and young people to listen to, and consequently empathise with and understand, the rural world around them (village, cattle pen, hillside, road, path, house, wine cellar, etc.), of which they themselves are often a part, even if they don’t realise or understand it.
The more than 200 sound documents the project has generated over the years (in municipalities such as São Pedro do Sul, Arouca, Vila Nova de Paiva, Castro Daire, etc.) came from listening sessions and recordings made by young people: simple, contingent, authentic and perhaps, by conventional standards, imperfect acts of listening — yet ones that reveal a genuine drive to search for meaning, at a time when young people, letting themselves be captured by the heralds of vacuity and immediacy, need courageous antidotes that draw on kindness and openness to offer existential counterpoints to their lives.
All the sound documents from the various editions of the Aldeias Sonoras project are catalogued in the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive (http://www.archive.binauralmedia.org).
The talk, led by Luis Gomes da Costa, will address conceptual and methodological aspects of the Aldeias Sonoras project, alongside the listening of some of the sound excerpts.
