In 2023, BABEL created the Residency Network of Artistic Residencies in Portuguese-Speaking Worlds (REDE) in arts and its intersections with the humanities, language and heritage. 

The REDE aims to maximize the creative potential of collective artistic research processes in a residency environment in the Portuguese-speaking art worlds.

In 2023/24, A REDE's annual programme will take place in Alcobaça and seeks to artistically investigate Que mar se se vê a final da minha língua? [What sea do I see from my language, after all?]

The Portuguese language is an intangible identity heritage that constitutes and manifests the myth of Lusophony, the Luso sound as if the Luso sound were one. 

This idea assumes that the boundaries of the Portuguese-speaking worlds are coincident with Portugal or the nation and the space of an old empire in a kind of Portuguese community entirely imagined, which includes the so-called Portuguese descents. 

The proposed curatorial and artistic research project seeks to understand through contemporary artistic practices, in their multiple manifestations, and through the work of artists, curators and other intellectuals dispersed in a world vaster than the former empire, what world do we finally see from this language after the shattering of both national and empire borders? 

We move around so much. We settle here and there temporarily. We travel through cities, countries and continents. We have no homeland or place to return to, and our children can hardly speak. As the Macanese poet, Adé dos Santos Ferreira said, our house is suspended in the air and has nowhere to land. 

What world can be seen from the perspective of my mother language after such a long journey? 

What sea do I see from this language that escapes me both in the written word and the oral construction? 

What sea do you see from my own language in a world of images? 

What has the exile of so many brought to contemporary artistic practices? What about migration? 

What map would we draw if the sea we saw from it were larger than the contours of the former empire? 

Despite the discursive praise that one hears dispersed and transitory on the lips of politicians, university directors or cultural centres, what is there in common between those of us who speak Portuguese, as a native or foreign language, dispersed around the world, besides the constant abandonment to which these "communities" have been condemned, and the manifest interest in the capital they deposit in Portugal? 

Are there ways to stimulate a more concrete and tangible community beyond the wound, the economic interests and that old imaginary, more imagined than lived? 

This project proposes a collective reflection on the real cultural space of the various Portuguese sounds in the contemporary world, beyond any ideology, be it political or economic, through current artistic practices, in their multiple manifestations, putting artists, curators and intellectuals in the diaspora in regular physical and virtual contact. 

As Chico Buarque suggests in the lyrics of his Cálice (Shut up), "Maybe the world is not small. But silence has no place in the city".

So, we will break that silence, create transnational networks and sing not the great deeds of Portugal and it's empire, but the the  improvised jazz of a language searching for its true cultural potential and identity, which is no longer fado! But bossa-nova! 

The working process stretches over 18 months, one month of open call (Aug-Sep), preparatory virtual meetings (Oct-Nov), three training sessions for the residents (Dec/Jan/Feb), three months of joint artistic residence (Mar, Apr, May) at Central-Periférica, between the ten winners of a global open call for Portuguese-speaking artists (2 from Portugal and eight from the diaspora) and the three invited artist-curators, with proven connections through a professional life divided between Asia, Africa and Brazil: José Drummond (Portugal - Asia), Ângela Berlinde (Portugal - Brazil) and Gisela Casimiro (Portugal - Guinea-Bissau), under the artistic direction of Margarida Saraiva, founder of BABEL - Cultural Association, who has been working for more than two decades between arts and between cultures, and conceived the theme of the first annual project to be developed within the scope of the REDE.

Stay tuned for the details of the open call.