Foram-se as cantigas

VIDEOPERFORMANCE

Full video, ask for permission here:

– CONTACT –

This work stems from the auditory memory of songs and vocal expressions once performed by farmers and rural workers in the Alto Minho region — voices that, for centuries, structured agricultural labour, marking the rhythm of the land, the harvest, and the body. Today, this intangible heritage is progressively disappearing, dissolving into a silence that accompanies the transformation of rural ways of life.

The work proposes a reflection on this loss through the figure of a body moving across a contemporary agricultural landscape. This hybrid, almost anachronistic being searches for sonic traces in a space where mechanisation and the reorganisation of labour have erased the need for collective singing. The body becomes an instrument of listening and searching.

The absence of sound becomes presence. Silence is understood here not as emptiness, but as a layer — a field where auditory memories persist in a latent, fragmented, and almost inaudible state. Songs, once shared and collectively repeated, now remain as sonic crumbs: dispersed fragments within individual memory and the collective imagination.

Foram-se as cantigas questions the possibility of listening to what is no longer sung.

The work is part of a broader investigation into memory, permanence, and transformation, understanding the territory as an archive and the body as a device for activating that memory.

The songs are gone, the crumbs remain.