FIO CONDUTOR

5 OCTOBER

Place X is a creation for public space about the mechanisms of extracting value from bodies, ecosystems, life and relationships. Extractivism marks the location of the treasure with an X. At this moment, no place, body, or form of life escapes marking. I intend to create fictional maps of the places where we don't want to or can't return, because there is no treasure to extract, no pleasure to discover. And, at the same time, investigate gestures to stay alive, despite and in the devastation. How do you create a body from ruins?

In the place we left behind, we opened a hole and dug. The earth calls us. We came to visit a lover, our own bloodless land. You can always open a hole. Breaking the cement and oblivion. Excavate various horizons and bring your listening closer to the ground. We open a hole and talk to the skin of that void. A collective meditation, where hands trace paths to impossible memories and gestures.

What would a contemporary counter-monument be today? How would it challenge authority, memory-making, and permanence? What would its form, functions, materiality, and lifespan be? 

Monumentum is a collaborative project focused on developing a communally dreamt, contextual prototype practice for thinking about and acting for such counter-monuments.

Using the dry stone wall technique as a metaphor and a framework, the project integrates collective dreams, desires, and memories with the textures of place, fiction, and community.  Through this approach, the collective seeks to uncover the unseen connections between handcraft, labour, societal tensions, and aspirations for the future. 

When no “mortar” is used what are the forces holding a community, a collaboration, a wall, an everyday practice together? How are these forces and relations expressed or embodied, and what kind of performative aspects arise from the relationship between monument and ruin?

Mudança do Templo is the construction of a sacred place. A dance for the e-spirits, a letter to a place in transition, a chant for the living. It is a sanctuary where to meet the waters of wisdom. It is an invitation to travel through infinite spaces. 

Mudança do Templo is part of the research TEKNETOOLBOX, which studies the relationship between ruins, sacred places and the body & space technologies associated with them to establish a relation with what surrounds us. All cells of the body are immersed in the act, so deep that indeed the observer, the object and the media become a whole. It focuses on cycles of collapse and regeneration of bodies and places, when something ceases to be what it was and becomes something else, something as yet unknown. That moment is when there is a multiplicity of latent possibilities.

Previously called “ribulum campania”, the Campanhã river, the Torto is a small tributary of the Douro river that remains largely forgotten. With just over 12 km, it originates in Serra de Valongo and flows next to Freixo, bypassing the territories of Azevedo and São Pedro. Known by neighbours as “the stream”, on rainy days, it still manages to surprise with its strength. “The anonymous water knows all the secrets.”

In a brief residency at the end of 2023, we followed its course in search of the stories, the memories, the lives that live on its banks.

With Azevedo Campanhã as the geographical area of ​​intervention, FOTOMEMÓRIA results from an artistic residency in the format of sound and visual performance that draws on collections of domestic images and local associations: observing, listening and interrogating, reflecting on the way they relate to memory and experiences of places.