INTER-RUMOURS is a participative interdisciplinary research project about the multicultural soundscape. It involves the work of researcher Ana Moya, musician Fernando Ramalho, and illustrator Lord Mantraste, and , is a journey from language to local daily life, passing through memory and music. We depart from sound registering carried out by forty teenage students (between 12 and 19 years old) of ten different nationalities, living in the Lisbon neighbourhoods of Alfama, Mouraria, Arroios, and Graça, , and attending classes in Portuguese as Non-Native Language at Gil Vicente Secondary School. The collaboration materializes for the Next Stop Festival, running from 28 to 30 March2019, and at the Temporary Art Gallery, until 24 July 2019. We present a sound installation composed and produced by Fernando Ramalho from recordings at four Lisbon Metro stations on the Green Line (Martim Moniz, Intendente, Anjos and Alameda), accompanied by panel presentations made by Lord Mantraste. A QR code connects to the website www.interrumores.pt, allowing users to interact with our sound interactive database.
Lord Mantraste transformed the sounds into a universe of tactile (clickable) sound designs, where faces, places, memories and daily activities become sound. We wish for visitors to enter this labyrinth of visual and sound worlds of twelve of our students: Kriti and Ashish (Nepal), Denise (Romania), Tangilá and Fokrul (Bangladesh), Suraj (India), Zhihao (China), Huy (Vietnam), Michele (Philippines), Lamarana (Guine Conacri), Emmanuel (Nigeria), and Malick (Senegal). These students are spokespersons for each of the nationalities that are present in the class. The forty students participating in this project, who have been living only a few years, months or even weeks in Lisbon, have contributed with all their enthusiasm and interest in the assembling of the sound collection available on this site. We also want the user to participate in the active creation of sound pieces, which can be as many as the imagination allows, through the selection, repetition, and mixing of the sounds when being clicked on each of the drawings.
In the site www.interrumores.pt you can listen to the four sound pieces that resulted from the sound recording made with the students participating in the project, as well as to travel through the sounds of memory they bring from their countries of origin, or the daily life of their experiences in Lisbon, their musical culture and the sound exercises that we performed with them. On the site we can not only listen to the sounds, but also mix them, allowing each person who navigates through it to produce their own sound tracks.
On this site we present the four sound pieces by musician Fernando Ramalho, inspired, created, and produced using the sonorous palette of the students’collection, in a sequential logic that takes us on a journey that begins in language, continues through memory and music and ends in the daily life of the city of Lisbon and the neighbourhoods where the students live. The four sound pieces can be downloaded here.
We wish to show with this work that the soundscape heritage is created in the present, as an active production and predicative creation of an experience. This soundscape heritage consists of a qualitative matter and an artistic expression (sensitive and existential) that as a whole gives meaning to space, opened to the articulation of the diversity of personal and collective identities.
Concept: Ana Moya and Fernando Ramalho
Coordination, analysis and sound mapping: Ana Moya
Musical creation: Fernando Ramalho
Illustrations: Lord Mantraste
The Next Stop Festival is an initiative of Largo Residências, within the framework of the Local Development Plan-GABIP Almirante Reis / Lisbon City Council (CML) / Arroios Town Council / Aga Khan Foundation, as part of the InFusão Program.
