Description:
At the crossroads of ethnographic record and poetic construction, “A Donkey Tale” proposes an imaginary encounter between two female donkeys — one from the mountainous region of Viseu Dão Lafões, in Portugal, the other from the Castilian plains of Zamora, in Spain. Separated by geographical borders but united by an ancestral, silent wisdom, these two non-human characters inhabit landscapes shaped by the discreet yet persistent presence of donkeys: animals historically pushed to the margins, yet central to the fabric of the rural world on both sides of the border.
The work asks how animals might perceive their territories — not as property or domain, but as an extension of the body, of memory and of their sensory experience in motion. “A Donkey Tale” also evokes the tragic nobility of Balthazar, the martyred donkey of Robert Bresson’s film Au hasard Balthazar, in which animal innocence passes through human suffering with silent dignity. It echoes, too, the lyrical tenderness of Platero, the silver donkey of Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Platero y yo, companion to a narrator who sees in his gentleness a kind of mirror of the rural Andalusian soul.
“A Donkey Tale” is a tentative ode to radical otherness and to the possibility of communication between animals and between places — an invitation to think the world from the oblique, attentive gaze of those who move slowly, listen to the wind and inscribe their memory on the very paths they tread.
“A Donkey Tale” is produced by Binaural Nodar in collaboration with the Castro Daire Municipal Library and is also part of the author’s doctoral research, carried out at the research centres ID+ (University of Aveiro) and LiDA (ESAD, Caldas da Rainha). The project is co-produced by the Associação para o Estudo e Proteção do Gado Asinino (AEPGA) and belongs to the set of artistic creations of the Tramontana Network project, co-funded by the Creative Europe programme.