Histories of Stories:
Gathering in the Square of a Mountain Village
— a documentary film about northern Portuguese folklore in an immersive media art installation
PhD thesis project, Lusófona University, 2024/2028
Project Synopsis
Inside an immersive media art installation (a room with projection on both four walls and the floor) is the centre square of a mountain village in northern Portugal. On the wall-screens, the bonfire is lit, the sky is turning dark, villagers are gathering, and the film is about to start. The audience sits on purposefully assembled stone stairs, straws and wool carpets in the middle of the installation. The screened documentary is about northern Portuguese folklore. It combines interviews with local people who tell the folklore, the eerie but fantastic landscape where the creatures “reside”, and the events that might “happen” in the teller’s stories. During the screening, the audience can freely choose where to look, walk around, share their opinion, or sit and immerse themselves in the stories and settings.
The project aims to recreate the storytelling environment of the past when a small rural community gathered in the village’s centre square and exercised the oral tradition. Through creative documentary and projection audio-visual immersive media art installation, the project may provide an innovative disposition to cinema screening and exhibition and offer an artistic representation of intangible cultural heritage to pursue its preservation.
Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi
The documentary
It is a creative documentary about northern Portuguese folklore. The local inhabitants will tell the stories through interviews. The tradition of folklore-telling in the village’s centre square will be recreated cinematically. Natural landscapes are presented along the stories told, where the fantastic creatures might “reside” and the stories might “happen”. It combines natural landscape and imaginative space exercised through oral tradition.
Dona Joaquina da Anta tells stories of witches and werewolves, Antas de Mazes, Lamego.
Photography by Agnes Meng and José Manuel Fernandes
The documentary is divided into two chapters:
The first chapter, “Por Este Rio Acima” (Up This River), is inspired by the complex river system in the northern regions of Portugal: Rio Douro, Tua, Limia, Salas, Varosa, Rabagão, Cávado… The documentary will feature creatures such as Mouras Encantadas (enchanted creatures), Bruxas (witches), Olharapos (one-eye giants), and Trasgos (elves) in folklore who “appear” near these rivers and valleys.
Mountains inspire “O Espírito da Peneda” (The Spirit On The Rock), the second chapter in the same regions: Serra do Barroso (Gerês, Soajo, Alvão), Marão and Montesinho, where the stories focus on creatures like Almas Penadas (lost souls), Diabo (devils), Morte (dead) and Lobisomens (werewolves).
Background: Folklore and the Oral Tradition
Portugal has a rich oral tradition in rural communities. From the 19th century, travellers and folklorists both contributed to the record, given the possibility of inheritance of this precious oral tradition. It existed in all historical provinces, but some regions had lost them due to population loss in rural properties and urbanisation, in both economic and cultural ways. However, there are still some regions, especially in the north, that keep the last inheritance of the oral tradition of folklore tellings. In the historical province of Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, a remote land with a reputation as the “wild west” of Portugal, this tradition has the most complete records with people in their lifetime who had exercised or still are exercising it.
Ironically, before the April 25th revolution in 1974, the Fascist regime used the rural culture to praise their nationalism idea. But local people and the oral tradition are innocent and should not be discarded and forgotten only because it was a “representative” but, in reality, a victim of the dark time. Therefore, in a democracy, the project aims to preserve these memories and cultural traditions as a human creation, supporting the narration of a community’s history.
In the last century, filmmakers like Manoel de Oliveira (Acto da Primavera), João César Monteiro (Veredas), António Campos (Falamos Rio de Onor), Noémia Delgado (Máscaras), and Manuela Serra (O Movimento das Coisas) had also contributed their works focus on the rural community in Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro, the traditional cultural activity, including the exercise of oral tradition.
It is still an urgent matter to work more on the record. Folklore telling is not unchangeable but always on the edge; it varies in different communities, individuals, and even times. However, it also needs time to shape its form, a life experience for an individual to be able to create and add their unique “pinch of salt” to its content. It is dynamic and presents the signs of a specific community’s changes. Therefore, folklore and oral tradition have great value in the social science study of a region and the historical study of a nation.
The Installation
The screening of the documentary is inside an immersive experience installation using projection mapping technology. It is a box-shaped room with projections on both four walls and the floor.
When one person tells stories on one wall, the other three may present a landscape supporting the teller’s story. Two or more tellers may appear on different walls and tell the same story together, complementing each other. The floor will be projected with the village’s terrain, land near the river, or mountain rocks.
There will be physical straw packs, carpets and benches for the audience to sit. The audience can choose where to look and move around during the screening. The surrounding sound will ensure that it comes from the correct source to make the experience authentic.
Sketches of the installation.
Left: general design
Right: content on the screen
Sample screenshot. Barroso mountain, Pitões das Júnias, Montalegre.
Experimental and Innovative Value of the Project
As a concept that appeared in the 1970s (Gene Youngblood), expanded cinema and combining art installations and cinema have become favourable curations in museums and exhibition venues. It is an innovation of the viewing experience, often made by the disposition of screens, elaborate projection and sound with artistic narration based on it, but also other than the film’s narration. It aims to combine the apparatus with context to create an immersive, sensorial, and participative experience for the audience.
By designing the screening in an installation, the project aims to break the border between conventional documentary narration and the apparatus, providing a new way of documentary production, viewing and participation. The joining of cinema and installation art exhibitions in museums in the past years has already proved that there is a possibility of uniting the narration with its apparatus and environment. However, these exercises mainly focused on more experimental cinematic narrations from directors with a strong aesthetic drive. As for documentaries, in recent years, VR documentaries have become a new experiment, but the immersive, museum and expanded cinema has not yet shaped a connection with documentaries, especially in the context of rural community and ethnography. An innovative way of exhibiting and viewing documentaries still needs to be experimented with, and ample potential exists.
Experimenting with the disposition of screens may also represent an innovative way to preserve intangible cultural heritage; when the audience is walking inside the exhibition installation, they are also walking inside the film. It provides an immersive participation experience. It may offer a feasible possibility of bringing the audience back to the experience, preserving both the subjective and objective sides of the heritage and uniting them together.
The project has won a grant from FilmEU - WIRE Horizon Mission Student Pilots in 2024.
David Hockney: Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away). (Copyright © David Hockney, 2023)
Gallery “Beyond Reality” at Frameless London. (https://frameless.com/)
Artist’s CV
Agnes Meng (China, 1991) is a documentary filmmaker based in Portugal. She is currently a PhD student in Media Arts and Communication at Lusófona University. She graduated from the School of Journalism and Communication at Tsinghua University; “DocNomads” Erasmus Joint Master that involved study at Lusófona University in Lisbon, University of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE) in Budapest, and LUCA School of Arts in Brussels.
Agnes has a background in filmmaking, journalism, visual anthropology and ethnography. She worked as an ethnography research assistant in southwest China and the Tibetan region.
Her first short documentary, Histórias de Lobos (2018), premiered at the 25th HotDocs Canadian International Documentary Festival. It was screened in film festivals worldwide, including the international competition at IndieLisboa 2018. It won the best short documentary award in several film festivals, including the 21st Guanajuato International Film Festival in Mexico. This made the film eligible for the Oscars in 2019. The film was also screened at social anthropology conferences and ethnography festivals worldwide, including the 32nd Society for Visual Anthropology Film and Media Festival (SVAFMF) in Canada, the 10th Athens Ethnographic Film Festival in Greece, the 13th Ethnocineca International Documentary Film Festival Vienna in Austria, and the 16th European Association of Social Anthropology Biennial Conference in Portugal.
Filmography
2018 - Histórias de Lobos (documentary, 22’, Portugal)
https://www.agnesmeng.com/histories-of-wolves
2024 - Histórias de Contrabandistas (documentary, 20’, Portugal)
https://www.agnesmeng.com/histories-of-smugglers
Contact
+351 933070112
