edited by Luís Costa & Rui Costa, 
Three Years in Nodar: Context-Specific Art Practices in Rural Portugal

edited by Luís Costa & Rui Costa

Edições Nodar, Nodar 003
This thick book, coming with two CDs, is the outcome of a three-year program of international sound art residencies made by twin brothers who have here focused on their Portuguese hometown – Nodar. Forty sound artists were involved in reading, watching and listening to the documentation of the respective projects. In the several hundred color pages of the catalogue the reader can be temporary
transferred to this place, able to glimpse at its history and inhabitants through a choir of personal and external perspectives. It’s a collective narration, sometimes distorted, sometimes enlightening, made through art projects. Nodar is clearly one of the hundreds of small gems we can find in Europe (and other places) – a village with its own culture, where natural, social, and production systems have created a strong historical legacy. The artists have enhanced the stories, details, materials, and unnoticed connections, exposing themselves to the sensitivities of the territory. The end result, which travels back and forth through time and space, is a priceless contribution to this area. The use of sound, expressed in twenty tracks, expands and somehow historicizes the experience; interpreting, testifying, archiving or sometimes simply editing a specific sensorial dimension of the village. Edited voices, noises, cries and natural sounds compose a subjective but complex and rich sound map, making this rural area residency program a successful model hopefully replicated elsewhere soon.