ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins. Lesson #4
July
2021
Wed
7
ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere
Chronicles of the Margins*
Lesson #4
CRL – Central Elétrica. André Braga, Cláudia Figueiredo, Pedro Vilela, Brazilian Questionings
The Marquês Garden is both historically and organically a junction in the city of Porto. It is the meeting point for several boroughs (Santo Ildefonso, Bonfim and Paranhos) and generations of city dwellers—it is one of the most important hubs for ‘park tournaments’ of trick-taking games (currently put on hold and adding to the isolation of the elderly population who usually uses it as an essential place to socialise), surrounded by the younger generations transiting within the city and between municipalities every day. From the novel underground to the bus, to the discontinued trolleybuses, whose aerial power grid connected Porto to neighbouring municipalities (Gondomar and Valongo) since the 1960s, not forgetting the former national road that linked Porto to the North of the country and is now Rua de Costa Cabral, the uptown has always been a privileged area to get in and out of the city. And that’s why Marquês is also an area where several strata of the socioeconomic fabric of the city intersect. More recently, the presence of the Brazilian immigrant community, even if not demographically and geographically located and identified, can be empirically felt.
CRL – Central Elétrica takes this nerve centre of the city as a starting point to participate in the curriculum of the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere. This geographical basis and the finding of “just how badly educated we were at school concerning our relation to Brazil”. André Braga and Cláudia Figueiredo invited Pedro Vilela, a Brazilian artist living in Porto, to join the project, and he in turn conducted over fifty interviews with Brazilian immigrants living in Porto in order to come up with an affective cartography of how the Brazilian community took over the territory. Based on a script that was the same for every interview, Pedro distinguished four maps: that of existence, that of affection, the political one, and that of memory. He then invited four Brazilian performers permanently or intermittently living in Portugal: Andrezza Alves, Marcondes Lima, Thaís Guimarães and Vinicius Massucato. This team crossed personal cartographies with the testimonies gathered by Pedro Vilela and the resulting cartographies in a collective creative process to which a new fictional layer was added.
The result is the performance Travessia [Crossing], which will be presented at Quinta do Covelo and takes on a travelling format, placing the spectator in a nomad place, confronting him with the others, and making him move, tire, and leave things behind, as a migrant would, in order to move forward. We got the impression from the class held by four Brazilians and two Portuguese that there are also still things to leave behind in this Portuguese-Brazilian relation. CRL – Central Elétrica intends this performance to be the beginning of a new programme where one will discover the changing city by seeking other spaces of oblivion and resistance.
*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.
Chronicles of the Margins*
Lesson #4
CRL – Central Elétrica. André Braga, Cláudia Figueiredo, Pedro Vilela, Brazilian Questionings
By Gisela Leal
The Marquês Garden is both historically and organically a junction in the city of Porto. It is the meeting point for several boroughs (Santo Ildefonso, Bonfim and Paranhos) and generations of city dwellers—it is one of the most important hubs for ‘park tournaments’ of trick-taking games (currently put on hold and adding to the isolation of the elderly population who usually uses it as an essential place to socialise), surrounded by the younger generations transiting within the city and between municipalities every day. From the novel underground to the bus, to the discontinued trolleybuses, whose aerial power grid connected Porto to neighbouring municipalities (Gondomar and Valongo) since the 1960s, not forgetting the former national road that linked Porto to the North of the country and is now Rua de Costa Cabral, the uptown has always been a privileged area to get in and out of the city. And that’s why Marquês is also an area where several strata of the socioeconomic fabric of the city intersect. More recently, the presence of the Brazilian immigrant community, even if not demographically and geographically located and identified, can be empirically felt.
CRL – Central Elétrica takes this nerve centre of the city as a starting point to participate in the curriculum of the ARK PORTO School at the Edge of Nowhere. This geographical basis and the finding of “just how badly educated we were at school concerning our relation to Brazil”. André Braga and Cláudia Figueiredo invited Pedro Vilela, a Brazilian artist living in Porto, to join the project, and he in turn conducted over fifty interviews with Brazilian immigrants living in Porto in order to come up with an affective cartography of how the Brazilian community took over the territory. Based on a script that was the same for every interview, Pedro distinguished four maps: that of existence, that of affection, the political one, and that of memory. He then invited four Brazilian performers permanently or intermittently living in Portugal: Andrezza Alves, Marcondes Lima, Thaís Guimarães and Vinicius Massucato. This team crossed personal cartographies with the testimonies gathered by Pedro Vilela and the resulting cartographies in a collective creative process to which a new fictional layer was added.
The result is the performance Travessia [Crossing], which will be presented at Quinta do Covelo and takes on a travelling format, placing the spectator in a nomad place, confronting him with the others, and making him move, tire, and leave things behind, as a migrant would, in order to move forward. We got the impression from the class held by four Brazilians and two Portuguese that there are also still things to leave behind in this Portuguese-Brazilian relation. CRL – Central Elétrica intends this performance to be the beginning of a new programme where one will discover the changing city by seeking other spaces of oblivion and resistance.
*Chronicles of the Margins - Gisela Leal, The Chronicler of the Margins, will follow the trans/cross-border expeditions of ARK Porto A School at the Edge of Nowhere, mapping the coordinates and identifying the territories explored by the “new cartographers” of the city in this open-air classroom. She summarised the covered contents on a daily basis.
© Alexandra Fernandes
© Alexandra Fernandes
© Alexandra Fernandes
