Derivas Canais

july, Canais Festival, Aveiro

Derivas Canais marks the beginning of a  work cycle that seeks intense experiences of contemplation and immersion in the landscape and communities around the “undecided landscape between sea and land”: the Kingdom of Vouga, and dozens of rivers, streams and riverside communities that make up the so-called Ria de Aveiro, which the most rigorous say should be called Laguna: “forty kilometers of coast, twenty kilometers inland, land and water, surrounding all the forms that islands, isthmuses, peninsulas, all the colors that the river and the sea can have”.

It is our intention to intersect this creation of territory with the cycle around ecothought and geopoetics that we will develop. Researching more about the specificities of nature in the Ria – plants, animals, geomorphology, and others – is one of the lines we intend to deepen. We are looking for intense experiences of being immersed in the landscape, that break with the avalanche of everyday life and, almost without realizing it, make us question deeply. In the debate of the ecological crisis, geopoetics argues that there are crucial changes in terms of thought and imagination.

The composer Pauline Oliveros, who dedicated herself to thinking and writing about what it means to listen, systematizing a practice she called “Deep Listening”, has always reinforced how active and in-depth listening can be a gateway to an unknown world, of untapped capabilities of consciousness and attention. In fact, a practice so powerful and so countercurrent that many have been defending it should be understood as a form of activism.