CHANNELS OF WATER AND ALIMENTATION
Artist Residency
With Luís Costa
From February 26th to March 10th, 2025
Agro Pontino, province of Latina (Lazio, Italy)
A production by Binaural Nodar in collaboration with the Ecomuseo dell’Agro Pontino (Lazio, Italy).
The fieldwork of the artist residency “Channels of Water and Alimentation” by Luís Costa was concluded, being part of the Creative Europe Tramontana project. This initiative took place in the territory of Agro Pontino, in the Italian region of Lazio, and explored the relationship between water conduction systems for agriculture, through the languages of sound art and experimental video.
The aim of the residency was to establish a dialog between different forms of water management used in European agricultural contexts, highlighting the historical, anthropological and ecological dynamics associated with each one.
The system addressed during the residency was water management in Agro Pontino (province of Latina), where large canal and dam infrastructures were implemented during the Italian fascist period. This irrigation model transformed swamps into fertile land, allowing for the expansion of large-scale agriculture.
In contrast, the resulting artwork will also look at the artisanal irrigation systems found in the Gralheira Massif in São Pedro do Sul, Portugal. Here, water distribution is based on a community system, in which local families have irrigation rights allocated by the hour. Small earth or stone canals allow water to flow from the springs to the fields, with farmers managing the water manually by blocking and opening the canals as the families need.
This artist residency is also part of the author’s research in the context of the Doctoral Program in Artistic Creation, with the support of the Department of Communication and Art at the University of Aveiro (ID+ research center) and ESAD Caldas da Rainha (LiDA research center).
Luís Costa (1968). Curator of contemporary artistic practices, sound researcher & educator and cultural animator in rural contexts. He is a PhD researcher in the context of the Doctoral Program in Artistic Creation at the University of Aveiro. President of Binaural Nodar since 2006. Coordinator of Lafões Cult Lab, an artistic research concept in the Portuguese territory of Viseu Dão Lafões which has already hosted more than 200 artists and social researchers. Coordinator of the Binaural Nodar Digital Archive, a research, cataloging and sound and audiovisual mapping project of the collective memory of rural territories. He is the author of 13 books on rural ethnography and contemporary artistic practices in rural contexts.
Many thanks to the Ecomuseo dell’Agro Pontino, through its coordinator Antonio Saccoccio.
