LISTENING, TOUCHING, AND IMAGINING BLACK CLAY
Artist residency
August 19–September 7, 2025
Ribolhos (Castro Daire, Portugal)
With Ana Carucci (Argentina)
During the artist residency “ Listening, touching and imagining black clay ”, which took place from August 19 to September 7, 2025, in the village of Ribolhos, Ana Carucci developed a work that intertwined ceramics, sound, and material memory, taking as its starting point the ancestral technique of black clay and its deep connection to the region’s natural environment. This artist residency was also part of the Tramontana Network project, co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.
The Argentine artist based in Spain created a series of ceramic objects that functioned simultaneously as sound instruments and sculptures, pieces that challenged traditional categorization by suggesting utility or contradicting it, activating a poetic space between the functional and the useless, the everyday and the symbolic. Some of these pieces had whistles, others had grooves, textures, and vibrating bodies that explored soft, dry, harsh, high-pitched, or resonant sounds, resembling friction idiophones.
The artist reflected on the transformation of Ribolhos black clay, which went from being a utilitarian material to a representative symbol with the arrival of plastic, exploring the ways in which the rules of use of objects expand, confuse, and overlap, opening space for more sensitive and lively relationships with these objects. Ana Carucci’s work focused on the relationship between nature and culture, taking clay as a living material steeped in history, filtered through her tactile experience and the present.
On Sunday, September 7, between 10:00 am and 1:00 pm, the community event “A Morning with Black Clay” was held at the Black Clay Workshop de Ribolhos, operating in one of the rooms of the village’s former primary school. The event brought together the local community and the public in a diverse and free celebration of the black clay tradition, including a walking tour led by local potter Jorge Ferreira, a direct heir to the tradition and responsible for promoting his work at the Black Clay Workshop. Ana Carucci’s art installation was also presented, and new content of the Black Clay Workshop was introduced, with participants having also the opportunity to try their hands at molding black clay with Jorge Ferreira.
The event, co-produced by Binaural Nodar, the Municipality of Castro Daire, and the Civil Parish Union of Mamouros, Alva, and Ribolhos, was part of the activities of the Tramontana Network, strengthening the dialogue between tradition and contemporaneity, local culture, and international artistic practice.
Photographs by Nely Ferreira, Ana Ferreira, and Liliana Silva for Binaural Nodar.
Binaural Nodar is a cultural organization supported by the Portuguese Republic – Culture, Youth, and Sports | Directorate-General for the Arts.
