Description:
“Brother, forgive me for bothering you, but I have come to ask you to teach me once again the correct way to walk on the surface of the water, as I have difficulty remembering it.”
Adapted from a Sufi legend in ‘Tales of the Dervishes. Teaching-stories of the Sufi Masters’.
The artistic project “The Third River: An Imaginary Journey Between Distant Waters,” carried out in December 2024, explores the role of artistic research in addressing certain complexities of the current global/local dialectic, focusing on the memory of riverine contexts in the rural world, in the wake of multidisciplinary artistic research that uses oral tradition, historical and geographical information, soundscapes, and poetic texts about water to reflect on the affective impact of rivers and streams on communities in two distinct regions: the Bisagno Torrent in the province of Genoa (Liguria, Italy) and the Paiva River valley in the Portuguese region of Viseu Dão Lafões.
The artistic research process was structured by crossing three conceptual dimensions:
- The role of creativity constraints in defining the research context (Onarheim & Biskjaer, 2017).
- An empirical-phenomenological work process (experiences felt from factual observations) that led to the generation of mental analogies (De Bono, 1973) and their conceptual blending in a third element (blend) (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998).
- The systematic use of artifacts, documents, or boundary or mediation objects (boundary objects) in artistic research (Star & Griesemer, 1989), particularly those from ethnographic and historiographic studies, such as maps, field notes, objects, and ethnographic interviews. (Martínez, 2021).
The resulting work, framed within an artistic process of audiovisual essay that included documents, photographs, objects, sounds, and moving images, proposes an “imagination of the connection between places” that constitutes an exercise in creative speculation with the potential to reveal unexpected connections or contrasts that may be culturally and/or artistically relevant.
Work co-produced by Studio Florìda (Genoa, Italy) and Binaural Nodar (Viseu Dão Lafões, Portugal) and developed in the context of an artistic residency held in Genoa between December 9 and 20, 2024.
Mediation support from Amici di Pontecarrega, academic support from the University of Aveiro (ID+ Research Center) and the School of Arts and Design, Caldas da Rainha (LiDA Research Center) and co-funding by the General-Directorate for the Arts (Portugal) and the Creative Europe program, in the context of Tramontana Network project.