PORTO (folklore volume 2)

PORTO

An Audio Portrait: We spent two months in and around Porto, Portugal looking for sounds of folk life. Searching out florid and fluid sounds in cafes, seaside villages, bakeries, wine-cellars, social clubs, churches, mountain slopes, shopping centers, (and so much more), we selected the final tracks with great care. There are two opposing spirits visibly at work here: the old idealized past of the port city that gave its name to the country, and the new budding European metropolis whose football club F.C. Porto became only the second team to win the UEFA Cup and European Cup in successive seasons.

The research method in our search was to avoid distinctions between folklore and contemporary culture. While the work is research-based and draws on several disciplines such as folklore preservation, anthropology, or documentary, we stepped carefully around these genres and instead followed our own code of working. We did not suggest an "anything goes" pluralist view of folklore. However, folklore is certainly more urban, complex, and layered than the pastoralists would suggest. We are attracted to the old and weathered, so our hunt led us more often to ancient, crumbling, tile-covered buildings than the new glass and marble malls springing up all over the region. We did not avoid newness in our path: many lovely and diacritic recordings of contemporary life made it to the final cut, often as telling background sounds.

Although we attempted to sketch a portrait of the city, we really described our own incomplete experiences in it. We sought harmonic moments where our own subjective understanding of a particular experience translated into persuading audio fragments. Background research can give direction, but the unexpected comes to any project. Because our definition remained open and analytic, our search was really for compelling recordings. This was not an exhaustive exercise.

The cd is divided into the following sections:

1. tracks 1-5: quotidian traditions.
2. tracks 6-13: celebration and ritual.
3. tracks 14-21: elaboration
4. tracks 21-24: music preservation

However, many tracks enter more than one category.

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Theory: English 19th century theorists such as William Thomas Clerk saw the clumsy, unprogressive, yet widespread customs of the countryside as remnants of another time. By accidentally surviving, this pastoralism in the face of urban progress evoked a romantic sense of tenacity. They saw the past as something to be valued in the present: folklore taken out of context to suit current needs. In fact, taken out of its context, folklore can be used for any ideological or economic pursuit: seen as "pure" and "healthy" folklore is often used as the foundation for nationalism, no matter what its true origins.
Since the purity and innocence of "folklore" is a myth, how does "fakelore" become the real thing? Richard Dorson created the idea of fakelore as a criticism: it was manufactured and somehow unworthy folklore. Self-conscious reflection is meant to be the antithesis of folklore, and yet, who in the 21st century is not aware of the constructions around them? (Especially of the economic variety.) So, does that mean that there is no folklore? Certainly not. Folklore has always been in flux. So, maybe these studies could be called "fluxlore"? Neat conceptual packaging aside, folklore has always been as much about new, urban and "progressive" cultural practices as it has been about idealizing the rural past. Millions of iPods carry seeds from our cultural past, both recent and far reaching. Is this technology somehow ungenuine? Or is the usual definition inflexible?

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Background: Porto is located in northern Portugal where the river Douro floats into the sea. The metropolitan area of Porto has grown rather large; there are now 1.5 million tripeiros (the nickname for people from Porto) in the region. It is historically connected to a strong shipping past, and a strong wine-making tradition. The vineyards growing in the extremely fertile if harsh landscape of the Douro River Valley upstream connects the region inseparably with its capital: most of the wine making happened and still occurs in Vila Nova da Gaia, directly across the river from old Porto city center. We included surrounding villages and some nearby towns in the study because of links to the city such as these.

Porto's traditional arts and crafts are similar in some ways to south Portugal, or even Spain, but Porto is on its own. The pride and originality of the people assured that any traditions arriving from the outside were adapted and molded stubbornly to their inclinations. Iberia-wide customs such as tile making, wine fermenting, bread baking, and music all have distinctly Porto features. For example, festivities share commonalities with Iberian folk and religious subjects such as San Juan in Spain, but the celebration of patron saint São João is distinctly Porto. Thousands of tripeiros bopping each others heads with plastic toy mallets is not a spectacle you see anywhere else.

The city is a salty mixture of old and new. Its UNESCO listed medieval quarter is as stunning for its history and complicated twists and turns as it is for its contemporary solutions such as scrappy aluminium siding and ad-hoc additions such as satellite dishes replacing statues on ancient, grassy, stone balconies. The famous, black, stone-like broa bread is still hand formed, and fired in brick ovens powered by chopped wood, but broa is distributed in the area by large supply chains such as the supermarket Pingo Doce. Traditional instrument makers use contemporary hydraulics, electronic tuners, and plastics as much as they use wood and chisel. Hundreds of folk music preservation groups around town (as everywhere) have frozen a mostly random selection of songs from the past into a loop. We all love them for their tireless persistence, work, and stubbornness to keep the sound in the world, but we must recognize this as only one part of the landscape.

An important part of Portuguese tradition comes from catholicism. Most of the processions on this recording are celebrations of patron saints. However, there are also pre-christian roots to many cultural practices. As we know, one of the ways christianity took shape was to adapt previously held ritual to its own ends. Many celebrations for saints are tied to pre-christian celebrations such as the harvest. What we see now in Porto is the culture slowly pulling away from the church, while holding on to the skeletal remains of its rituals. Many of the important catholic calendar days are now mostly drinking holidays for the greater population. Currently, catholic rites are still observed with at least some piety, but the current here looks back to the observation and celebration of nature and the seasons, mixes it with catharsis, and the rituals continue.

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INSTALLATION: A 25 square meter tile floor (also designed by Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman.) Hand painted tiles realized by Vuelta da Cor, Porto. Stickers. All drawings by A&A. Installation documentation here:

Return to front Porto page:

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Tracks, full text.

1. Barbearia Salão Ferreira. A common hairstyle of local men is given by barbers using two stainless steel scissors, one in each hand. Instead of using an electric razor to thin the hair in neat layers, they use a rapid snip-snip motion like Edward Scissorhands. In this track, we went to Pedro Rocha's local barber downtown and asked if we could record. While the radio played soothing songs in the background, two older gentleman had their gray streaked hair trimmed.

2. Lavadouro. Although most homes have their own electric washing machines, the tradition of the lavadouro, or communal laundry tanks, still exists in some places. In this particular place, Afurada, there is one lavadouro higher in the hills, and a shiny new one next to the Douro. Nearly every day of the week women carry baskets of clothes (some balanced on their heads!!) down to this squat, tinted glass, steel building a few meters from the river to scrub, rinse, gossip and sometimes sing.

3. Fishing in Foz. Nearly every night, and even in the rain, anglers come down to the rocks jutting out into the water where the river meets the beachhead. Mostly they are men hanging out in groups of two or three, drinking wine, each of them hoping to catch a long, gray, spiny Congro eel. They stand there adjusting their fishing poles in the wind and waves until very late, sometimes 3 or 4 am. The sound in the recording is of a cast, whirring gears and something being reeled in. Also the bells attached to the top of the poles jingle when a fish is on the line.

4. Vegetable Seller, Mercado do Bolhão. The central market in Porto is still ablaze with color, smells and sounds all year around. Once the main place to buy and sell fruit, vegetables, cheese, meat, fish, flowers, bread, wine, and spices it is now slowing down due to the competition of hundreds of smaller supermarkets across the city. The woman in this recording mentioned that she has been selling vegetables for 60 years in the same market, but that it is becoming more difficult to survive this way because of the pressures of the supermarkets. She then operated her mulch machine grinding deep green kale into the proper consistency for the famous and delicious caldo verde soup.

5. Amolador da Facas, Mercado do Bolhão. Although there are ambulant knife sharpeners in town, this one set up a semi-permanent shop in the back entrance of the market. Working the stone with the attention of a sculptor, el afilador grinds knives of all shapes and sizes into maximum efficiency. In the recording, the first part is of the father grinding some larger knives, and the second part is of the son sharpening a few smaller ones.

6. Bugiadas in Sobrado. We stumbled on this disturbing and complex festival in Sobrado, a village several kilometers to the north east of Porto. Otherwise a quiet agrarian village, all hell breaks out during the Bugiadas festival on the 24th of June. Celebrating to some degree the old conflicts between the moors and the christians, it also addresses such topics as social criticism, sin, punishment, and marginality. Around a hundred villagers dress as christians in red, mid-19th century velvet uniforms with tiny bells sewn into the seams and rubber monster masks with brightly flowing caps. Also, twenty or so villagers dress as moors in colorful, embroidered soldier uniforms with big hats topped with feathers. There is an epic fight between the moors and the christians at night, but mostly the moors stick in formation during the day. It is the christians who commit most of the weird rituals. After lunch, one of the christians, menacing with his monster mask, mounted backwards onto a nervous horse, and beat on a porno magazine with a stick until he was led to a bar. At the bar he shouted for payment until the bar owner emerged and offered a bottle of wine. Soon after, a local man, dressed as a filthy blind beggar, flailed in mud and horse manure. The christians taunted him, pulled chairs out from under him and playfully kicked him down in a symbolic attack on the marginal itinerant. Later, representing the kidnap of a woman, a local man dressed lewdly as a woman pantomimed distress in a shocking display. Another perplexing ritual was the fetishistic reversal of the agrarian order of tilling the earth, planting the seeds and harvesting the crop. Events such as these continued throughout the day, and are repeated on this day every year. The action does not take place on a stage, rather, it weaves in and out of the crowds, at irregular and surprising intervals, and uses public space as its theatre. At one point while we recorded, we were invited to fondle the fake breasts of the cross-dresser. We politely declined. Another thing we noticed was that most of the people participating in the masquerade did not change out of their sports shoes: it was a sight to see Adidas stripes under such costumes. The exact scene captured in the recording is the time leading up to the cobrança dos direitos when the christian, mounted backwards on the horse, demanded payment at local bars.

7. Mouriscada in Sobrado. The second part of the festival described previously is the Dança da Mouriscada, or the Dance of the Moors. Typically in Iberia, the Moors are, unfortunaly, not depicted in the best light, but in this festival their role is unusually regimented. In the recording we hear a drummer giving minimal cadence for a group of Mourisqueiros walking like toy soldiers in intricate patterns. In the background, a marching band somewhere in the village dramatizes another part of the festivity.

8. Boat Horns, Afurada. Afurada is a small fishing village tucked in an ear of land on the mouth of the river. São Pedro is the patron saint of fishermen, so it is important to the village. On the day of São Pedro the people paraded a few dozen extra large, carved and brightly painted saints from their resting places in the white-washed church down steep hills to the docks. There, a sculpture of Saint Pedro presided in a rowboat in a parking lot. After a few words from the parish priest, the saint is assumed to have blessed the water, and all the fishing boats in the harbor blow their air horns. This piercing, intricate sound blew for more than a half-hour for those who could stand it.

9. Procession in Póvoa de Varzim. We went to the town of Póvoa just north of Porto to see the Procissão dos Santos Populares. The local church opened its doors, and all the statues of the saints came parading out on decorated floats carried by local community groups dressed in their sunday best. The route wound up and down the streets to the sea and back. The streets were packed with people, but almost everyone was strangely quiet, reverent. The sound in the recording came from the ritual of carrying one of many saint floats. The parade moved slowly with stops and starts. A man in the lead position of an ornate float rapped the wood base with a ceremonial hammer to signal the eight man team to pick up the saint by its handles and walk in an organized rhythm. Another rap signaled the team to stop and balance the float on eight wooden poles for a brief rest.

10. Celebration and/or Protest in São João de Frende. Looking for a festa in some lost village in the hills of the Douro River Valley, we accidentally happened upon the animated dedication of a new fountain. But what seemed like a happy affair turned political when we noticed the large signs declaring how the local government had been misspending huge amounts of money. The sign further complained that a new school or hospital could have been enjoyed with the funds. The new fountain was in a standard cement slab plaza in the middle of the tiny, one road village. Frende also had sweeping views of hilly vineyards in addition to feisty community spirit.

11. Santo Padroeiro, Ajuda-nos! As mentioned above, during the day of Saõ Pedro in Afurada, the saints are dragged from their resting places in the church and taken for a walk down to the sea. At one point, little girls in white dresses carried a fine mesh net by its four corners. The girls, and their adult escorts walking alongside, shouted out along the way: "help, help us Saõ Pedro". People threw coins down into the net so the saint, and maybe the local church, would be more agreeable.

12. Portugal Beats England. Portugal hosted the Eurocup during the summer of 2004. Towards the end of the tournament, Portugal upset the English team to the delight of motorists in Porto who blew their horns all night, not settling down until around 6am.This recording was captured at around 3am when we gave up trying to sleep and went out to join the celebration a little.

13. Rosário. Wandering one sunny afternoon through hilly, maze-like streets in the Miragaia neighborhood, we heard whispering coming from the cracked door of a church. Slipping inside, the temperature and the mood both dropped ten degrees. Eleven older women, dressed in faded black scarves, sat hunched over pews fingering beads and canting the rosary. One woman led the chant, the rest of them followed immediately after. When the lead woman's voice started to get hoarse, a second woman took the lead for a while. Apparently the women meet informally like this for at least an hour, several times a week. Since all of the women looked well over 60, this practice will probably not continue for much longer.

14. Joaquim Nogueira e Filho, Fabricante de Concertinas. Slightly outside of the city in one of the many new suburbs of Porto, Sr. Nogueira and his son set up an instrument making studio in their garage. The studio is full of wood and metal scraps, strange hybrid machines (built by hand to do specific tasks related to instrument construction), and healthy creative chaos. But in one small, organized side office are shelves set up with examples of the gleaming finished concertinas and accordions known to players around the world. His son is an accomplished accordion player, and together they take limited orders for hand-made accordions and concertinas of various tunings and dimensions. In this recording, the son demonstrated an accordion in an early stage of construction. The sounds are of strips of metal that will determine the tune, some wooden switches, an electronic pitch tuner, and the bellows not yet attached to an accordion. There is also a ringtone from someone's pocket. And finally, Nogeira’s son picks up a replica of an 19th century concertina and plays a local Porto tune.

15. Domingos Martins Machado, Cavaquinho Maker. Gently working the wood into curved, delicate and deeply resonate string instruments, Sr. Domingos works small miracles. Seemingly weaving gold from straw, it looks impossible that all those scraps of wood are transformed into a guitar, a shorter Portuguese guitar, or the nobel little cavaquinho, the ancestor to the Ukulele. In this recording both Sr. Machado and his son Alfredo Matos Machado work on cavaquinhos in early stages while listening to the radio (of Portugal playing a football match).

16. Domingos Plays Cavaquinho. Domingos plays a dramatic little number on one of his cavaquinhos.

17. Broa de Avintes from Paderia Neto. We first saw this bread at the Mercado do Bolhão sitting solidly on a marble shop counter. It seemed to come from the earth itself. Made from different mixtures of rye, barley and corn flour, this bread is heavy like a stone. Black, round and tall, the bread is decorated by a thin layer of white flower and cabbage leaves clinging underside. It tastes malty, a little sweet and a little bitter. The crust is improbably tough, but the inside is soft and tender, and it tastes splended alone, buttered, or with soup and red wine. To get this recording the curator Pedro called a family broa bakery in Avintes to ask permission to visit. The daughter answered, said we should speak to her mother and asked us to call back when it gets dark. He called again later in the evening, but the daughter answered again and said it was not dark enough yet. Finally a few hours later, he got the old woman on the phone, b.ut she could not understand why we would want to come visit except that we wanted money from her. She began to tell the story of her husband's illness, and how she couldn't give us money. Finally Pedro convinced her that we didn't want money, that we just wanted to visit the making of the broa. "Oh, then come over" she said, and passed the phone back to her daughter we assumed to make an appointment. But the daughter decided she had had enough of us, and gave the excuse that her mother was too old for visitors. In order to find another phone number, we went to the village of Avintes and asked around. We found the sister-in-law of a baker in a shop who gave us a phone number and an address for the bakery, but told us that we should not go visit right away because Manuel Neto, the baker, would be sleeping, that was about 8pm. A few days later, and after getting lost again in Avintes, we found the unmarked white house holding the Paderia Neto bakery and went in. Three woman and one man scooped, shaped, slapped a flour coating on and slid the heavy brown meal into the wood-heated oven. The air was thick with white flour, and grew increasingly dense until it was hard to breathe, but only one of the bakers wore an air filter. Although the bakers were talkative, there were long periods where the only sounds were of the bread making and a radio somewhere in the background
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18. Tile Factory "D-Arte Cerámicas" in Aveiro. This is the factory that produced half of the tiles we designed for our exhibition at the Serralves Museum. Using old hand glazing, painting, and firing techniques in combination with new printing and artisan machine hacking, this factory produces original and antique replica tiles of high quality. The proprietor of the factory, Carlos Reis, makes a thousand adjustments to the machines, conveyor belts, automatic glazing systems and other assembly line tools to tweak their previous uses to suit each new project. Although there are artists on-site painting scenery and patterns by hand, the factory also employs such devices as an automatic paint agitator (to keep sediment from settling), an automatic tile alignment device (post oven), and serigraphic printing techniques for full color tiles. The sound in the recording is of pre-glazed tiles cascading from one of the conveyer belts from an upright position to laying flat in preparation to apply a traditional egg shell glaze.

19. Wine Testing at the Caves Ferreira. Wine-making is an extremely delicate and scientific activity. Located on a hill overlooking the Douro river and Porto's old city center, the wine testing room at Ferreira looked like a science lab and a luxury hotel room at once. The technician in charge, a trained chemist, was responsible for a methodical and controlled process of pouring the test wine. First, he laid out and opened at least a hundred bottles of different types of red wine with one tall wine glass next to each bottle. Next, he poured a shot of wine in its corresonding glass and dumped it to rinse it of impurities. And finally, he poured the final test amount into each glass, placing it back onto the marble counter ready for the testing team to come later. He repeated these steps for about 12 minutes. Since each stage of wine production demands rigorous, controlled and time-practiced methods, science and aesthetics are equally important. Although the flavor, scent and color of a wine such as a ruby red port may be judged subjectively, the process of making wine instead of spoiled grape juice is exacting and meticulous.

20. Filling an Oak Barrel, Caves Sandeman. There are no longer artisans capable of making the giant oak barrels needed to store certain vintages of port. There are very few craftsmen left who even know how to repair the existing ones. So, these great, dark, humid oak shells are treasured by the wine houses as gifts from the past. In the recording, we hear a mechanical pump filling one such barrel to the brim with a white port.

21. Bottling at Caves Grahams. Although the tour guides take the average tourist past the picturesque ancient oak barrels storing the really good port vintages, most of the fermentation takes place in cement or stainless steel vats. And most of the bottling is done using high tech equipment such as what we hear in this recording. The mixing in this track happened naturally by walking along the automated lines, the microphone picking up different sections of bottling, corking, labeling and boxing.

22. Rita and Adriano Sing Without Accompaniment. The best folklore preservation society we found was the Rancho Típico da Amorosa in Leça da Palmeira, just next to the port of Matosinhos. (Although it sounds pastoral, this town is industrial, a heavyweight in Portugal.) The musicians of the rancho were talented, but the atmosphere of the club was what made it so special. We found that many other clubs had heavy atmospheres: usually one or two older men, obsessed by technical perfection, pushed around bored younger members, who were probably obligated to go by their parents. But the Rancho Tipico da Amorosa group was animated and spirited from the youngest to the oldest members. Rita Soares, a cashier at a local supermarket, and Adriano Correia, a dentist's assistant, are two of the youngest members in the group. Although we loved how the whole group sounded together, we were interested to highlight the voices of these two because we so often saw passion for folklore only in the older generations. We normally never ask to change anything we are recording, but in this case, we wanted to capture the song as it may have been a long time ago: voices only. Rita and Adriano were hesitant. Adriano said that they never sing or play any instrument alone. But, laughing, they decided to try it anyway. The song is about a spring courting ritual between a young man and a young woman. Despite their reservations, we were blown away by the power and richness in their voices, even if they had never sung alone before.

23. Sericoté. Complete with dancers whirling in complex patterns, the Rancho Típico da Amorosa practices for three hours in this gymnasium space twice a week. Although this song began with some hesitation, all the players worked themselves into full steam by the middle. At the end, a few of them grumbled that the song wasn't done right, but we thought it was lovely. This song makes reference to Guinea during the days of colonial Portugal, but the accompanying dance is an old round dance from Leça da Palmeira.

24. Domingos Martins Machado Plays Cavaquinho.

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2005 Alejandra and Aeron

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This project was only possible because of Pedro Rocha and Fundaçáo Serralves. Porto, Portugal. www.serralves.pt