‘Brother, forgive me for bothering you, but I have come to beg you to teach me once again the correct way to walk on the surface of the water, for I have difficulty in remembering it’.

Adapted from a Sufi legend in ‘Tales of the Dervishes, Teaching-stories of the Sufi Masters’.

Because of feeling "in between places’, I often imagine being able to jump, walk or be quickly transported between the contexts in which my loved ones live. 

The artistic project ‘The Third River: An Imaginary Journey Between Distant Waters’ explores the role of artistic research in addressing certain complexities within the current global/local dialogue, focusing on the memory of river contexts, following a multidisciplinary artistic research that makes use of orality, historical and geographical information, soundscapes and religious texts about water, to reflect on the psico-social impact of torrents and rivers in the communities of two distinct regions: the municipality of Genoa (Liguria, Italy) and the municipality of Castro Daire (Viseu Dão Lafões, Portugal).

The project uses the concept of ‘boundary objects’ in order to create a ‘third artistic place’ in which interregional and interdisciplinary dialogues can flourish The resulting installation seeks to challenge ultra-localist narratives, proposing an ‘imagination of the connection’ and also an expression of objectively shared aspects in geographically distant but culturally connected contexts. This project thus illustrates how artistic practice can foster interlocalist dialogue, providing a multidisciplinary framework for exploring the commonalities between different landscapes and potentially enriching the cultural perspectives of the regions being compared.

BIO

Luís Costa (Lisbon, 1968) has been working since 2004 as a curator/programmer of contemporary art practices, a sound and media artist, and an educator and cultural animator in rural settings. President of the cultural association Binaural Nodar, he is Coordinator of the Lafões Cult Lab, a place for artistic multimedia research and hosting in the rural area of Viseu Dão Lafões, which has already welcomed more than 175 sound and media artists and social and environmental researchers, and of the Nodar Binaural Digital Archive, a sound research, cataloguing and mapping project, an integral part of the European network Tramontana awarded the Grand Prix Europa Nostra - European Cultural Heritage Prize in the research category in 2020.

He is the author/editor of twelve books devoted to artistic creation, especially sound and media, in rural contexts, rural ethnography, and ethnomusicology, including the catalogue Three Years in Nodar: Artistic Practices in a Specific Context in Rural Portugal (2011), the book Tales of Sonic Displacement: SoCCoS, a sound-based artist residency network (2016), and the book Memoria Tramontana: Changes in rural Europe as seen by its inhabitants (2019). Since 2007, he has developed an intense activity of sound and media creation in rural contexts, through which he reflects on the natural, cultural and social specificities of places, as well as their memory and processes of transformation. Of particular note are Villaggi Sonori (2007- 2010), Memoria Sonora del Sughero (2014-2015), Ponti Perenni sull'Acque Temporanee (2018-2019), and Acqua Dolce, Acqua Salata (2024), an artistic sound and audiovisual reflection that brings into dialogue the "water cultures" of three areas of the globe, the Paiva River in Portugal, the Yaguarón River in northern Uruguay, and the island of Salina in Sicily, Italy.

photos credits: Francesca Migliorin