Prossigo

as Community-based Artist

Jan 2012 - Abril 2012

The challenge proposed by the festival was significant: to think of sound as an immersive blend with rural architecture. Various questions and ideas arose in the urban territory, in this case, the city of Aveiro, thinking of creating a piece for a place while being in another place, exercising the implementation of a project for a site where our imagination drew an unknown and distant reality from our daily lives—in conclusion, a result prone to disaster.

Upon arriving at the location, Fraguinha, all the ideas and preconceptions about rural architecture crumbled. The reality presented itself with a different experience.
It was from the on-site experience, the real-time interaction with the variables of time and space in which the working group found itself immersed, and not with preconceived ideas from a "cosmopolitan" city, that we were going to develop the project. From this immersion in the landscape and the experience of a region, a strong connection with the element of water emerged. Upon arriving at each village, we began to notice that the "center" of these places/villages had in common a stone-built tank that held a large quantity of this element. It was not a pillory, a church, or a café, but rather a tank from which a series of connections with various purposes derived.

On the other hand, all areas designated for agriculture were delineated by watercourses constructed by the population using various resources, from more modern practices like the use of cement to the use of stones for their conduction/orientation. It was from this observation that the Prossigo project began to be outlined. Starting with a watercourse, we began to divert and (re)guide it to flow through the adjacent dry fields. Using slab stones, we "designed" new paths enveloped in a freedom conditioned by stones with sharp shapes. At the end of the journey, the watercourse was directed and returned to its "natural" course. A libertine journey of a watercourse, constructed and guided by black walls.

This entire process was recorded on video and audio, resulting in a quadriphonic sound/video installation that would gain other dimensions of significance and even sensory aspects, depending on the location/space in which we adapted it. The user/spectator, placing themselves in the created artificial environment, felt involved with an artisanal process of interference with a natural environment, which had already been reconstructed over time. The connection of water with the toil on the lands, its interference, and direct connection with the development of a society, makes this piece and all its surroundings fundamental for understanding its presence as a divine element.

Prossigo results from the blend between video recordings of alterations made to a watercourse and the sound capture of these same alterations, combining these two mediums so that the user/spectator feels part of this process, flowing with it as if it were a perpetual cycle.

Project created by:
Emídio Medeiros (BR/PT)
Tiago Martins Pinto (PT)
Rodrigo Malvar (PT)
Rogério Guimarães (PT)

More info here: https://www.binauralmedia.org/news/en