It was a beautiful encounter at the Gnration in Braga. CORDÃO is a community choir made up of cancer patients in treatment or remission and their friends. A “cordão” (string) is something that unites, that binds’ and CORDÃO is just that, a way of ‘connecting people, sewing together new ways of living and looking at cancer’. CORDÃO is woven in Braga on a regular basis. It is growing, building its own identity and we received the invitation with curiosity and ‘artistic-academic’ interest, since art and human development, and participatory art in particular, is one of the subjects we work on. But we also received it with affection because it was also a re-encounter with Ricardo Baptista and Joana Araújo, the project leaders. With Joana, in particular, we have many stories of mutual learning.
In the ‘cartography’ of the CMT-Universe, we have used the expression OutLab Tuning People Birds and Flowers to designate this possibility of working with groups of people in a flexible way, experimenting, listening, creating, looking for the sounds and gestures that unite us, that transport us to poetic spaces of deep attunement with our surroundings (people, birds and flowers). It is part of the idea of ‘research’ and often leads us to reflect on what we do and to understand in a different way what we observe around us. The work we did with CORDÃO makes us think, again, that another name for ‘community choir’ could be ‘collective singing community’ or perhaps ‘creative collective singing community’. They are just words. What happens, what is done, what is felt, the intention-of-the-doing and the effect it has on those who embark on these journeys will always be difficult to name.
Thank you
CORDÃO is a project by Faz Cultura (Empresa Municipal de Cultura de Braga), supported by the PARTIS & Art for Change programme (an initiative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the ‘la Caixa’ Foundation) and with the support of the Braga Local Health Unit and the Portuguese League Against Cancer.
Photos: Ana Dinis
