Description:
“The Night in Common” is an audiovisual essay on the sound and ritual traditions linked to the popular itinerant songs of two distant places: São Pedro do Sul, in Portugal, and Penna Sant’Andrea, in Abruzzo, Italy. In the depths of winter, when the nights are coldest and longest, voices become the bearers of an ancient ritual. In the songs of the Reis and the Janeiras in Negrelos, São Pedro do Sul, as in the songs dedicated to Saint Anthony the Abbot in Penna Sant’Andrea, a sonic energy resounds that breaks into the silence of the night.
Through these voices a fundamental passage is celebrated: the arrival of the new year, with its wishes for prosperity and well-being, or the protective intervention of Saint Anthony the Abbot, patron saint of animals, to whom hopes for the health and protection of livestock, the mainstay of rural communities, are entrusted. The essay reflects on the power of these vocal expressions, on the very act of asking and giving, and on how the voice becomes a bridge between the human and the divine, between past and present.
“The Night in Common” places the traditions of Negrelos and Penna Sant’Andrea within a shared Mediterranean cosmology. The research goes beyond ethnographic documentation to build a “third place”: a conceptual threshold where the memory and perception of distant communities converge in a transitory human fabric.
Work produced by Binaural Nodar (Viseu Dão Lafões, Portugal) in partnership with Bambun APS, Centro Studi Don Nicola Jobbi and the University of Teramo (Abruzzo, Italy), as part of the author’s doctoral research in the Doctoral Programme in Artistic Creation of the University of Aveiro.
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 Directorate-General for the Arts (Portugal) and the Creative Europe programme, in the context of the Tramontana Network project.