The NME announce the launch of PLACE:
​an international project on cultural research
​and artistic practice
 April 11, 2016  |  NME Internal Press

The NME are proud to announce the launch of PLACE, an international project extended to Portugal, UK and Italy. Led over a period of three years (2016-2019), the pilot project is aimed to research and performance-based investigations on the concepts of space, social environments, psychogeography and community identities.

PLACE will be realised by a number of artists, researchers, documenters and cultural agents working together through a complex structure of teams and boards. Under the direction of the NME founder Rodrigo B. Camacho, it will count on a variety of Portuguese, British and Italian institutions, among which the NME will have a primary role in both the production and the realisation of the initiatives.

The NME performers, who have so often proved the quality of the ensemble, will constitute the core of PLACE’s artistic agenda. The following years will see them joining arms with the Lisbon-based collective Camara Nova Ensemble (CNE), engaging in four international artistic residencies. During those, all open to the public, the practitioners will work together on some original pieces of music/performance art composed after a selection of literary texts, chosen by an appointed team of researchers in collaboration with the artists.

The list of texts includes poems by Alberto Lacerda, Ana Hatherly, Cabral do Nascimento and Luiza Neto Jorge; authors who composed their works in contexts of cultural alienation, on voluntary or coerced exile. In their works, language becomes a conscious means to articulate these writers’ relationship with their own culture, testifying to the multifaceted interplay of identity and otherness that defines intercultural practices.

As PLACE is intended to be an ongoing-research project, other literary documents may be added to the writings selected so far. Researchers will expand the range of their work, aiming to discover a bigger number of texts reflecting on cultural identities in urban spaces, socio-geographical environments, or dealing with issues of re-creation and mediation in languages, without excluding mediums other than verbal language. Most likely, this will come to acknowledge documents that customarily fall outside the margins of national or international canons.

By focussing on these writings, PLACE will investigate the interrelation of socio-physical spaces and cultural creation. Beside the artistic products of the project, a set of six conferences will be organised and realised in the partner countries, in slots of two conferences per year and per country. Conferences will call upon a wide range of lecturers and researchers, not only from to academic backgrounds, and will concern the relevant topics of PLACE, such as:
  • cultural contamination;
  • identities;
  • construction/perception of culture;
  • construction/perception of identity and otherness;
  • language and translation;
  • relationships between literature and performing arts.

The production of PLACE will be combined with the realisation of smaller-term satellite-projects, similarly to a trunk ramifying into lateral branches. The 2016 main initiatives of this sort will be:
​
  • Place | Trampolim (Portugal: Lisbon), led by producer Filipe Ferraz with the participation of the Camara Nova Ensemble (CNE) and researchers Ana Salgueiro, Zuzanna Sanchez, Rodrigo B. Camacho and Sara Rodrigues.
  • Place | Tratuario (Portugal: Funchal), organised by Ana Salgueiro with the participation of researcher Duarte Santos; composers Rodrigo B. Camacho, Sara Rodrigues; dancers Nuno Filipe (AKA Mr. End), Mariana Andrade, Margarida Menezes, Paula Sousa; and poets Maria Fernandes and Dinarte Vasconcelos.
  • Place | Hatcham (UK: London – York – Oxford), led by the New Music Ensemble (NME) with the participation of Goldsmiths-associated researchers Dimitris Exarchos and Francisco Calafate Faria.
This ambitious project targets the intersection of arts, music, literature and socio-cultural studies. It will generate a variety of outcomes, ranging from original scores to performance recordings, from photographic books to academic publications. All the products will be documented and officially presented during the last year of PLACE (2019), and further disseminated in the following years.

This Summer, London will be home to the achievements of PLACE | Hatcham satellite-project: in situ rehearsals and workshops will happen between the 11th and the 15th July at St. Catherine’s Church Hatcham, by Telegraph Hill, while site-specific pieces will be premiered there on the 16th July.

The Portuguese collective Velhaca will provide audio-video documentation for the project’s main progress, while local enterprises will contribute to the documentation of smaller-scale initiatives. Full journalistic coverage will be conducted by an appointed team of writers and editors. At present, PLACE counts on the partnership of Goldsmiths (UoL), the University of Lisbon, the Catholic University of Portugal, the University of Madeira, plus other cultural centres and associations. The production team is currently working on the formalisation of partnership with Italian institutions.

All information is available on PLACE’s official website The NME warmly invite everyone to attend PLACE’s first initiatives in the UK.

To find out more about the projects, visit the page: 
​http://www.place-projects.com/.

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Words and editing by: Gabriele Cavallo