Sensing Places Together
To conclude the A-Place project, three closing events will take place in three partner cities during the fourth and final year. The first two events were held in Brussels in May 2023 and in Barcelona in June 2023, and the last event will be held in Lisbon in September 2023.
The purpose of these events is twofold: to share the outcomes of the A-Place project with stakeholders engaged in fostering a sense of place and belonging in our interconnected and multicultural societies, and also to provide a platform for reflection upon the results achieved throughout the project.
Ultimately, the aim of these gatherings is to facilitate meaningful discussions and exchanges among architects, artists, scholars, cultural agents, and educators from diverse academic levels and fields, all of whom play crucial roles in collaborating with communities to create and shape meaningful places.
The overarching theme of the third closing event, “Sensing Places Together,” will focus on the perception and representation of places through our senses and diverse media. The event will explore how individual perceptions influence the collaborative creation of places using various art forms.
The two-day programme will include speeches from guest speakers, discussion panels, concerts, and exhibitions of A-Place works.
Additionally, the journal “Annales. Series Historia et Sociologia” (ISSN 1408-5348) has launched a call for papers on the theme “Building Our Cities around People and Places” (deadline: 8 October 2023), which will be guest-edited by A-Place partners. Interested authors are invited to participate in the discussions in Lisbon by proposing a theme and contacting Leandro Madrazo at leandro.madrazo@salle.url.edu.
Download the programme here.
Programme
Thursday September 14, 2023
10:00 Welcome
Maria Irene Aparício, NOVA FCSH
10:15 Introduction to A-Place
Leandro Madrazo, Project Coordinator
10:30 SENSING PLACES: ARTISTIC INTERVENTIONS
Keynote: Branka Cvjetičanin, “Pedestrian Viewpoint — Body Space Architecture Economy Poetry”
Tales of the cities from the pedestrian viewpoint is an art-based performative practice setting the basics for experiencing cityscapes and urban circumstances. How do we sense the atmosphere?
How do we navigate invisible borders? Or deal with collective memory loss? I will introduce four different stories of four different cities and the ways of detecting environments as social and cultural settings. The case studies are placed in Zagreb, Rijeka (Croatia), Mostar (Bosnia and Herzegovina), and New York (USA). Performative practice as an educational model within urban studies investigates environmental resilience, urban cultural and natural heritage from the basic viewpoint of the pedestrian, tickling major urban priorities and challenges. This practice is a part of a new interdisciplinary educational programme within Urban studies at the DELTALAB Center of UNIRI – University of Rijeka, specially designed for researching urban zones and community/human/nature interactions within built environments, as well as envisioning future environments, involving major questions of how to read environments, discovering historical narratives of landscapes, investigating the cognitive side of architecture, body economy, and neuroplasticity in a very analogue way.
— The talk will be followed by a discussion with A-Place partners.
11:30 Visit to Exhibition
Presentation of A-Place works by partners (ESTUDIO A) and invited artists (ESTUDIO B)
13:00 Lunch Break
14:30 ART AND LEARNING
Mara Maravilha, Polytechnic Institute of Viseu, “INVENTIVENESS, what place(s) between art and education?”
Performative action and communication that seeks to bring to the stage of the discussion about learning and art the concept of inventiveness as a place of expression and autonomy, of gestures and speeches from childhood. What places are these? Will they be forgotten places or eternalized in our (sensory) memories? What places and what times do we find, between art and education, for each one’s inventiveness? Will there be time and space to invent? That is, “To walk with our heads in the clouds?” In my childhood, when “I walked with my head in the clouds”, I imagined and invented fantastic stories! And all the stories I made up … were true!” So, what truth could this be?
— The talk will be followed by a discussion with A-Place partners.
15:30 Visit to Exhibition
Presentation of A-Place works by partners (ESTUDIO A) and invited artists (ESTUDIO B)
16:30 Coffee Break
17:00 “SEEING” PLACES
Lara Seixo Rodrigues, Mistaker Maker — Artistic Intervention Platform, “Identity corpus as raw material”
Lara Seixo’s work at Mistaker Maker is based on the idea that the local value of each territory, which is multiplied by countless cultural assets — historical, archaeological, architectural, linguistic, documentary, artistic, and ethnographic, to name a few — can and should be embodied, mirrored and/or exalted by artists in new values of memory, authenticity, originality, rarity, or exemplarity, enabling the (re)discovery of these territories.
She understands the public space as the true stage of interaction, exchange, involvement, and the construction of a (necessary) citizenship and states that Urban Art is a tool capable of promoting the transformation of a community and/or territory, aspiring to its growing appreciation, cohesion, sustainability, economic development, and desirable cultural decentralisation and active citizenship. In this session, she will try to share a bit of this huge experience of transforming communities and territories through creation in public space in Portugal.
17:30 “HEARING” PLACES
Luís Cláudio Ribeiro, Lusófona University, “Aural Experience and Territory”
Places that may or may not be occupied always have an acoustic memory whose contents may or may not persist over time. To record and understand the sound maintenance and changes of a territory is not only to establish an individual memory but especially a collective one. The sound album became an instrument and essential information for anthropological, sociological, urban, and cultural studies. Lisbon Sound Map (FCT, 2011-2014) and Aural Experience, Territory and Community (FCT, 2018-2022) projects identify and reflect on the changes produced by sound in contemporary societies and on its experience in cities. Planning the three major territories of sound — stable, hybrid, and in transformation – makes it possible to establish historical and identity landmarks for cities based on their soundscapes.
— The talk will be followed by a discussion with A-Place partners.
18:30 Roundtable
With the A Sound Place composers João Quinteiro and Jaime Reis and the composition students of the ESML
19:00 CONCERT
“A (travelling) Sound Place”
Performers Duo Contracello
Miguel Rocha, cello
Adriano Aguiar, double bass
Henrique Portovedo, saxofone
Composers
Jaime Reis
João Quinteiro
Composition students of the Lisbon School of Music — ESML
Marta Domingues
Ana Roque
Hugo Xavier
Mariana Ribeiro
Mariana Vieira
Francisco Rosa
Through the performance of Duo Contracello and Henrique Portovedo, we will explore the idea of “travelling sounds” as shared memories and emotions; sound as a common sense of community and belonging; and sound as a symptom of the permanent changing nature of a multicultural contemporary society. Sound shapes spaces and can transform them into places. A place can become familiar through its sounds, or its music, along with its sight or smell… It can be pleasant or unpleasant, a quiet place or a noisy one. If one changes the sounds of a space, the place will never be the same.
Friday, September 15, 2023
10:00 SENSING PLACES: AUDIOVISUAL LANGUAGES
Keynote: Elvira Pujol, Sitesize, “Perception, the resonance of places”
The experience of a place translates into the feeling of the site. The latest projects developed by Sitesize focus on the perception of the life that inhabits places as well as the living earth that sustains them. The trilogy TERRÀpolis (2021) dedicated to the city of Hospitalet de Llobregat, is an attempt to connect with the potential of what we call “the symbiotic city”, a relational aspect of place in which there is always a retro-dependence with the living substrate. The film takes the form of a journey through the physical, spiritual, human, and non-human life of this place. Following the course of the streams, we advance through the densely urbanised valley to reach the end of the first chapter and crown the Can Serra neighbourhood from the eleventh floor of one of its towers. We let ourselves be carried away by the waters of the river that flow constantly through the delta; the vestiges of its agricultural past are still evident in the fertile lands of La Marina, today converted into a logistics and port centre. Away from the noise, the infrastructure and railways that cross the city, we explore the augmented reality of the ecosystems and the energy that underlies all their life forms. The project is called Water Snakes. The hidden streams of Barcelona (2020-23) is another initiative to reinterpret the city through the waterways that cross the Pla de Barcelona. To re-read the city under a regime of relations in which the pre-existing natural conditions related to the circulation of water become activators of levels of significance, of cultural and social construction, of what is produced on an apparently neutral and homogeneous surface.
— The talk will be followed by a discussion with A-Place partners.
11:00 Visit to Exhibition
Presentation of A-Place works by partners (ESTUDI0 A) and invited artists (ESTUDI0 B)
13:00 Lunch Break
14:30 ECOLOGIES: (RE)CREATING AND SENSING PLACES
“Landscape Museum”
Maria João Centeno, ESCS-IPL & ICNOVA
João Abreu, ESCS-IPL
The Landscape Museum (MdP) is a digitally based museum dedicated to landscape. It arises in the context of raising awareness and education for a landscape citizenship that, like the landscape itself, will have to result from a continuous and collective process. The MdP, as a participatory platform that generates knowledge, representations and dialogues about the landscape, creates important challenges from a curatorial point of view. It is intended that this digital museum facilitate a deepening of knowledge, perceptions and affections related to the landscape, through a careful design of the way in which its elements are shown, the representation of different themes and experiences of the places and the underlying conditions of public interaction with the platform.
15:00 “Ephemeral Gardens”
Sandra Oliveira, VNBM — Arte Contemporânea
Jardins Efémeros (JE) is a multidisciplinary cultural platform based in Viseu. It has a strong experimental component, with the aim of enhancing the relationship between artists, curators, researchers, universities, tourist associations, companies, museums, schools, the municipality, residents, and visitors. The use of iconic spaces such as the Cathedral, the lgreja da Misericórdia, museums, chapels, public and private buildings, vacant buildings, gardens, parks, squares, and being anchored in the historic centre provide citizens with a unique experience. Our programme promotes reflection around values such as active citizenship and social architecture, enhancing the critical and imaginative capacities distributed among the various areas of intervention proposed.
15:30 “Passeio”
Helena Pires, CECS/UM
Zara Pinto-Coelho, CECS/UM
Passeio (the Portuguese word for walk) is a Platform for the study of art and urban culture. Focusing on the daily actions that take place on city streets, ranging from the accordionist’s dance step to the pose of the living statue and the street seller’s cry, we want to recover the memories shared by pedestrians and residents: the memories of shopping stores and coffee shops, the life stories of street artists and traders, and the testimonies of ethnic and cultural minorities inhabiting the city. The platform is one of the research projects of the Communication and Society Research Centre (CECS) that was designed within the strategic action framework for the years 2015-2020.
— The talk will be followed by a discussion with A-Place partners.
16:30 Coffee Break
17:00 Visit to Exhibition
Presentation of A-Place works by partners (ESTUDI0 A) and invited artists (ESTUDI0 B)
17:30 CONCERT AND AUDIOVISUAL INSTALLATION
“Passages”
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João Ferreira, composition, sound design, keyboards
Marta Fiolić, video, photography, editing
This audiovisual installation is based on the testimonies of the women of the SOMOS MULHERES (WE ARE WOMEN) Association about their livelihoods, their struggles, their setbacks, and their triumphs before, during, and after experiencing homelessness. The narratives have no beginning or ending; they reflect different passages with different odds and possibilities, while the sounds and images help the immersion in the experiences, faces, and places. The installation is envisioned as a slideshow of photographs and videos in synergy with a live musical performance using keyboards and electronics. The musical piece was created from the interviews and street sounds captured passing through the Mouraria neighbourhood, between Praça da Figueira and lntendente, relevant for the individual stories. The integral parts of the installation were created within the scope of the A-Place Project’s activities in Lisbon in 2023.
Soundwalking in Bairro do Rego
For A Reconnecting Place, a placemaking activity of A-Place Project in Lisbon in 2022, a series of pieces were co-created with the neighbourhood’s youth while highlighting the potentiality of music and sound to enhance the experience of a place and exalt the creative responses to it. Together, these pieces formed a unique soundwalk. We encourage you to visit Bairro do Rego and “listen” to the neighourhood. You can dive into the experience and explore the sounds and spaces of the neighbourhood by following a specifically designed and geo-located path through the ECHOES* app.
*To explore this collective sound experience, it is necessary to download the ECHOES app (free and available on Android and iOS) and bring your headphones.