The Materiais Diversos Festival promotes the meeting of different audiences and imaginaries around the arts (dance, theatre, music and performance) with thought, questioning actuality and fostering cultural participation as a condition for citizenship. Born in Minde, in 2009, it spread to Alcanena and Cartaxo (in 2013) and became one of the most representative projects for programming outside the large centres in Portugal, attempting to think and act from the places it originates. It had been occurring annually until 2017 and became a biannual event starting with its 10th edition in 2019.
From the 5th to the 15th of October 2023, the Festival Materiais Diversos will be in Alcanena and Minde with a program of dance, theater and music shows, installations and conversations. Slowing down and making people, places and processes visible are the mottos of the 12th edition of the festival.
The term “traceology” comes from the words trace (trahere) and science or discourse (-logia), and therefore designates the ‘discourse’ or ‘science of traces’. The term “traceology” designates a scientific method used in archaeology, more specifically prehistoric archaeology. It aims to determine the function of an ancient tool by studying the traces left upon it, to observe the polish and wear and tear, even down to a microscopic scale. As such, these traces offer clues; how the tool was used and its function, how it was handled, the movement it generated and the matter it was meant to alter.
This new project, Traceology, is part of my research on movement and the exploration of subtexts as possible motors for physical action, as well as my study of body dynamics and states. This time, however, the work is envisioned in a societal context of (post-) pandemic reality wherein our relationship to others has been “amputated” when it comes to the sense of “touch”, a touch that, despite everything, remains fundamental to physical work.
What interests me in the science of “traceology” is how it ultimately relies on studying a series, a sequence of ‘contacts’ and therefore of ‘touches’; the contact between hand and object, object and matter, and consequently, the hand whose action transforms matter. A science of traces or, as this project views it, a discourse of gestures—here the interest is in all the possible variations of nuance when executing the same gesture or a multiplicity of gestures, while also probing the degree of dramatic intensity in the resulting dance.
Working through explorations, we will approach the vestiges of gestures as signs of disappearance to be incorporated, but also as traces that we will collect, classify or cite while delving into the material imprints that we see remaining.
How do you touch a gesture or action?
How can you activate the trace of a gesture or movement?
How do we accompany the emergence of action?
How can we touch an inner movement?
How do you slide from one gesture to another, moved by the images carried, evoked, called forth in every one of us?
How can we create a score in which the memories of infinite past touches become passageways that we inhabit fully, in the present moment?
Olga de Soto, 2020
Diversos