pockets

Border Fieldnotes: Senderiz
André Araújo

Henri Lefebvre ¹ presents spaces as produced within a triad that relates how they are conceived, perceived and lived, that is, respectively by their representations, social practices and discourses. The places we pass are permeated by this intangible yet resonant bond. 
The village of Senderiz is no exception.

Being immersed in the territory has led to the weaving of an affective cartology, interlaced with the memories of those who had 200 goats in their care at the age of five, the Portuguese and Spanish women who exchanged rye for corn bread at the border, the 29-kilo bag of smuggled coffee carried for countless kilometres. Work in the fields as well as emigration. Codes, memories, languages. Things that generations have learnt. The “Caldos”, the smells and the bread that “will never come back”. The stories of hardship that it is hoped “remain behind us”, mixed with nostalgia of those days when we were 25 boys and 25 girls dancing without light.

All this contact with the territory is reflected in the fieldnotes, where meditations, interactions, methodological doubts, archives and, step by step, how the various dimensions of the place began to be established through the image, light and layers are displayed beside transcripts of conversations with locals which, from records of short walks, casual encounters to invitations into their homes, reflect the inability to epistemologically imagine this village beyond its echoes.