This research stems from a lifetime of lived experience between urban and rural worlds. Born to parents who emigrated from a rural region to Lisbon, the researcher grew up oscillating between two realities — the multicultural periphery of the capital and the pristine valleys of the Paiva river in Viseu Dão Lafões. In 2004, a deliberate return to that rural world led to the founding of Binaural Nodar – Cultural Association, which has since hosted over 175 artists and researchers from more than 20 countries in artistic residence.

Over two decades of curatorial, artistic and editorial activity across rural Southern Europe — including projects in Spain, Italy, Uruguay and Brazil — the researcher developed a sustained engagement with the complexity of rural places: their identities, transformations and interlocal affinities. This doctoral research in Artistic Creation (Universidade de Aveiro / ID+ / LiDA, 2023–2026) formalises that accumulated experience into a practice-based methodology.

The central question: how can artistic practice, through an interlocal and multimodal methodology, capture and make visible the — often invisible — relations between geographically distant yet culturally related rural places? (Borowiecki et al., 2016; MacClancy, 2015; Figueiredo et al., 2011)

The research is situated at the intersection of four established fields. In sensory ethnography, the work of Pink (2015) and the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard (Castaing-Taylor, 1996) frames an approach that privileges embodied, multisensory knowledge over textual description — while recognising that the researcher does not claim the role of ethnographer in the disciplinary sense.

The tradition of the audiovisual essay as a “form that thinks” (Corrigan, 2011; Rascaroli, 2017) — exemplified by Hutton’s long-take cinema in Two Rivers (2001–2002) and Russell’s dialectical montage in Good Luck (2017) — models how sensory rhythms can evoke inter-local connections without erasing difference.

Site-specific art provides the paradigmatic anchor through Kwon’s critique of the field’s expansion beyond singular place-dependence (2002). Finally, expanded cinema — from Youngblood (1970) to Akomfrah (2023) and Bellour’s querelle des dispositifs (2012) — frames the transition from linear essays to the interactive installation.

This research inscribes itself within practice-based artistic research: theoretical frameworks are not applied externally as analytical grids — they are operationalised as active devices that directly guide fieldwork, audiovisual capture, editing and installation. (Barrett & Bolt, 2007; Bolt, 2007)

Place is understood — following Heidegger’s Dasein (1927/1962) — as a pre-reflexive mode of being-in-the-world, while Didi-Huberman (2026) ensures the research resists any notion of fixed origins: place is dynamic, porous and relational.

The methodology follows an empirical-poetic approach developed within a dialogic operative field. The researcher is NOT an ethnographer in the disciplinary sense: this quasi-ethnographic dimension exists only within the space of artistic practice — experimental cinema, audiovisual essay and installation. (Castaing-Taylor, 1996)

Each essay applies the methodological scheme of Chapter 6 — identifying the specific thematic, the relational typology (mirror, contrast, journey/leap, analogy) and how each dimension (landscape, ethnographic, historical, literary, poetic) is concretised in that specific inter-local encounter. (Costa & Duarte, 2025)

The transition from the linear audiovisual essay to the installation space inscribes itself within Bellour’s theoretical debate on the limits of the cinematographic apparatus (2012). Inspired by Akomfrah’s multi-channel montage (2023), the installation distributes 54 video clips from all 9 essays across 2 screens, dynamically activated by visitor movement via Kinect and Unity.