Festivals & Symposiums

EXPLORING PUBLIC ENCOUNTERS WITH ARTISTS AND COMMUNITIES

Binaural Nodar bases its intervention on a sense of daily permanence in its rural region, so that in the development of its creative activities, priority is given, both in scale and in community interaction, to the conception of a vast constellation of personalized interventions. This means that for us it never made sense to hold large festivals, which tend to be ephemeral and hardly providing vital relations between visitors and the hosting territory. Nevertheless, the meeting and the feast have always been part of these rural communities, so since 2006 various types of public moments have been tested, in the form of rural-based symposiums and small festivals.

The first series of public events took place between 2006 and 2012 and was strictly linked to contexts of public presentation of artist residencies in sound and media arts held in many rural villages along the municipality of São Pedro do Sul (Nodar, Sequeiros, Macieira, Sul, Manhouce, Candal, Covas do Monte, Covas do Rio, São Martinho das Moitas, etc.) and in villages bordering the river Paiva (such as Fráguas, municipality of Vila Nova de Paiva and Areinho, municipality of Arouca). In 2006 it took place in the village of Nodar the international symposium Pushing the Medium #2, a collaboration with Estonian cultural organization Moks which hosted about twenty sound and media artists from Portugal, Spain, Italy, Estonia, Austria, etc. and which joined a very significant audience curious to see a completely different event from the usual in these valley and mountain villages. The following year, the Fronteiras (“Borders”) Meeting took place, a collaboration with the Galician collective Alg-a, which consisted of two blocks of artis residencies, one in Nodar and the other on Saint Simon Island (Pontevedra) and of a later series of public moments (a retrospective exhibition, conferences and live performances). In 2010, the Paivascapes #1 festival followed, an itinerant meeting that consisted of a series of site-specific presentations along this clear river belonging to the hydrographic basin of the Douro River, in 2011 the Vozes de Magaio Festival was held, am event dedicated to rural voice and which combined oral and musical traditions from the São Macário mountain area and contemporary vocal and sound performers who were previously hosted at an artist residency. In 2012, the Sound & Rural Architecture festival took place, a multidisciplinary meeting with architects, anthropologists and contemporary artists who carried out site-specific architectural and sound installations in rural villages in the municipality of São Pedro do Sul.

Between the years 2015 and 2019, Binaural Nodar implemented a cross-border event, Ocupai – Iberian Festival of Art and Action, an attempt to bring freedom of expression to the public space of the Lafões region (municipalities of São Pedro do Sul , Vouzela and Oliveira de Frades), as a productive and creative weapon to make life in rural areas more open and less formatted. Ocupai is an Iberian festival in the sense that it assumes its geographical position in the Portuguese Viseu Dão Lafões region, located at the intersection with regions of the north-western arc of the Iberian peninsula: Minho, Douro, Galicia, Asturias and Castilla y León, which share so many historical, linguistic and cultural connections and promotes spontaneous interactions with artists who come from comparable contexts and have been working for decades to move consciences in peripheral territories, taking risks as a way of life and being closer to “ordinary” and communal life. communities.