As part of the Tramontana III project, Binaural/Nodar has developed a long ethnographic field work around linen in the village of Várzea de Calde (municipality of Viseu, Portugal), which has, since time immemorial, the perfect conditions for the cultivation of this plant on an appreciable scale, due to the proximity of to the Vouga river, which provides abundant irrigated land. As often is said in the village: “here in Várzea de Calde there is a loom in each house”, that is to say that this is a paradigmatic case of specialization of a village in an specialized activity, a specialization that comes from a distant past. It is not, as such, a recent “idealized” construction, as often happens.
The project was coordinated by Luís Costa with sound and audiovisual recordings by Luís Costa, Manuela Barile, Liliana Silva, Alma Sauret, João Farelo, Nely Ferreira and Tânia Ribeiro. In addition sound and audiovisual recordings where made of the stages of the linen cycle, also a wide range of interviews was carried out with the village weavers, in a total of more than a hundred documents.
This field work lead to a multimedia exhibition which took place between December 2017 and March 2018, the incorporation of content into the permanent collection of the Linen Museum of Várzea de Calde, a bilingual book in Portuguese and French “Várzea de Calde: A village woven in linen”, a documentary (with the same title), a CD of polyphonic chants dedicated to linen, several workshops, conferences and dissemination actions.