Grams of Conviviality
What is a city and what is not? Where it begins and where it ends? How to connect with peripheral areas?If everybody is leaving the so called city but also the borders are abandoned, where will people go? And how will we meet in the future?
Thanks to: Miguel, Sofia, Bruno, Manuel, Beatriz, Isabel and all the team of Trienal de arquitectura de Lisboa
Recorded in Graça, Lisbon, Portugal
LONG STORY SHORT
In the morning, from the top of Senora do monte, one of the city’s many mirador, nothing is visible. A thick, cool white mist rises from the ocean and covers the whole city, Christ the Redeemer, and the bridges that connect the new neighborhoods beyond the Teijo. You can hear jackhammers, squeaking streetcars, the occasional siren gliding up, down the very steep streets of Lisbon, the final destination of the first collection of radioLina. Not that it’s any better when the sun comes out, we still can’t see much, blinded by the shiny calzada of the pavement, the pale stone of the monuments and the shimmer of the ceramics that cover half the city. It is benevolent, this fog, softening our arrival in the city, seeming to protect us from the dozens of waves, encountered, listened to, picked up or released, that come to strand at the edge of Europe.
Freeing us from the interference is the voice of Miguel, who tries to recount the call of the Triennial of architecture, which guided our research: how heavy is a city? But as we discuss, over a codfish, in the din of Graça, the boundaries of urban and rural blurring are blurring: what is a city? And what is rural? Where does one begin and where does the other end, if everything from the sea abyss to the planets are increasingly linked and interconnected? Heavy in what sense, heavy for whom? Can conviviality be a cure for this heaviness?
It was difficult to find answers to all, but surely, in these ten tracks, collected over two weeks in places, antipodal to the urban dimension, radioLina recorded not only interferences and noises, but strong, singing waves, surely waves long enough to continue to accompany us throughout the return.