Film-Poem: Imagens Em Rochas / Images On Rocks
Between 2021 and 2024 I undertook an ecological artist residency in the Côa Valley, in eastern Portugal - a collaboration with archaeologist/ethnographer Bárbara Carvalho and also the musician Jesse D. Vernon. Much of our creative fieldwork and community involvement was carried out in the zone of the valley close to the Faia Brava nature reserve, which is the location of the Lapas Cabreiras site, known for its impressive collection of prehistoric ‘Schematic’ painted rock-art motifs.
One of my key areas of focus, for creative recording (to make visual poetry) is ‘work and workscapes’, i.e. manual work happening within the land. This can include the repetitive actions, gestures, noises, vocalisations etc. of working individuals and teams. To me, these functional activities can be seen – and heard - as having choreographic, scenographic and performative.
In November 2022, I was invited to record a collective - and atmospheric - olive harvest in the village of Cidadelhe, perched high on the rocky western slopes (or cliffs) above the River Côa. Another high point of the residency was a night visit (led by Bárbara and associate Mário Reis) to the stunning Palaeolithic rock-art near the mouth of the Côa river. With Jesse improvising live violin music, this added up to a unique and powerful scene. Then, in April 2023, on the steep eastern slopes of the ‘gorge’ of the Côa, I had the opportunity to spend five fascinating, hot, dusty days in the company of the LandCRAFT* project team, led by Lara Bacelar Alves, and also including Bárbara, Mário Reis, Joao Muralha and others. The focus here is on more recent, post-glacial, ‘Schematic’ painted rock-art. In that spring of 2023, the main task for LandCRAFT was to carry out a ‘dig’ (excavation) in the area below a granite rock-art shelter - to hopefully shed new light on the society and culture that left such an intriguing symbolic graphic legacy. The ground here has a complex challenging topography, mostly due to the very large granite blocks that have fallen from the rock-face over time, splitting along joints that are a feature of such granite outcrops. These rock-falls also destroyed sections of the pigmented (red, purple, orange) ‘gallery’ of symbols or motifs within the shelter.
While being present at Lapas Cabreiras with my own ‘tools of the trade’ (cameras, lenses, filters, microphones), my interest was directed at the actions, and sounds - of hands, bodies, implements; repetitive scraping, brushing, breaking (rocks), filling (buckets), sifting (soil), squeaking (wheelbarrows), beeping GPS devices. Stone, metal, flesh, wood, plastic; elements in concert - all combining to form visual and aural poetry.
As I immersed myself in the place and ventured deeper into the surrounding landscape - listening, observing, sensing - there seemed to emerge a concordance, or perhaps a continuum, between some of the ecological activity (and sounds) and the archaeological activity (and sounds). My senses perceived a blending of bird calls, frogs, insects, horses, water, leaves and the murmurs, chatter and shouts of the diggers. Of course, the humans were not the only diggers, sifters and collectors; the ants were busily at it too. And very close to the archaeological dig, dung-beetles were neatly processing, transporting and storing their rich ‘findings’ - legacy remains of larger mammals.
In relation to the scientific dig, my perspective was that of a neophyte (‘newly planted’!) or naif (innocent, foolish), and thus could encounter this ‘stage’ or theatre through mental filters that framed the scene as an absurd melange of actions and ritual-like gestures. Also, within this ‘free’ state, I was reminded of one of my favourite poems, ‘Spraying The Potatoes’, by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh, where, attending a seasonal farming task, the poet is drawn to the micro-scenes of collision or juxtaposition between human and wild nature (and modern technology) e.g.
“A wasp was floating
Dead on a sunken briar leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean.”
So - yes, the archaeologists had their job(s) to do, including recording with pen, paper, photographs, photogrammetry, digital GPS mapping etc.; but my role was very different, and distant from theirs. I could revel, and relax, in the luxury of unbounded observation. I could inhabit the uncomprehending wonder of a child (again - that naif sense) who doesn’t necessarily seek to understand, but rather to absorb and appreciate; to blur senses and perspectives; to erode distinctions between human and more-than-human. To not care. And to quote another ‘poet of the land' (Thomas Hardy) “They also serve who only stand and wait, I was there, in that place - waiting - not for information, but for beauty, sensations, and imaginative prompts and leaps.
In this mode, I conjectured that we (or they?) were perhaps situated ‘off-world’, on another planet, seeking...I don’t know what? Perhaps something like spice (as in the novel ‘Dune’)? In my poetic imagination, the ambience – and aesthetic - was extra-terrestrial. Prompted by this, I began to film using a deep red filter, cutting out all visible light except for the near infra-red spectrum. Space-explorers in a Martian scene, perhaps? Maybe this escapist fantasy was also self-protective, psychologically. From our very distant early human lifeworld, our journey has taken paths that have led now to brutal hi-tech drone warfare, bio-weaponry and a nuclear arms stand-off. These reflections were never far from my mind while ensconced at the shelter of Lapas Cabreiras, along with the pure, and purist, scientists (who also had their own drones, ‘targets’ and tools/weapons). For all tools are weapons.
And maybe this simply is the point of making a poetic videosonic piece like this? Not to inspect, dissect, analyse and order time, but perhaps to collapse time, to dissolve time - and space; and boundaries, borders; to be in a freely associative fuzzy state? And invite back in a sense of the undomesticated human-wild? As perhaps was once experienced here at the rocky promontory of Lapas Cabreiras, where (it has been conjectured) sky-burials may have happened, in collaboration with the vultures.
The vultures are still here. Now.
Imagens Em Rochas / Images On Rocks
(A film poem by Antony Lyons. Improvised music by Jesse D. Vernon)
* LandCRAFT – the socio-cultural contexts of the art of the Recent Prehistory in the Côa Valley
The project is about understanding the ways the earth (Land) was worked (Crafted) over time. Alongside this understanding, it also seeks to reflect and share how the work of archaeologists Shanks & McGuire (1996) develops in the sense of building knowledge about the communities of the past.
Shanks, M. McGuire, R. (1996). The Craft of Archaeology, American Antiquity, 61 (1): 75-88
Translated words of Sérgio Gomes (LandCRAFT)
The strangeness of the landscape. Antony Lyons invites us to think of Lapas Cabreiras as a place of estrangement. The daily routine of the excavation is presented in brief sequences of gestures and voices, unfolded in games of distance, viewing angles and reflections. The montage explores the familiarity of each sequence, gesture, voice, angle and reflection, each however, with maladjusted scale. This mismatch results in a narrative that disappears at every moment. Without a guiding thread, or in the multiplicity of narratives without beginning or end, the film leaves us with the feeling of following something we don't understand; leaves us in the company of a strangeness. With such mismatches, the purpose of LandCRAFT is also played out: to make archaeology a way of encountering the landscape and restoring its enchantment.
A memory to be happen. The mismatch makes us think that it is not the past that archaeology is about, or it is not just the past that archaeology is about, but the mismatch of time. The maladjustment that opens up the perception of the conditions of each moment, opens up the possibilities of, at every moment, recreating the memories of a place (its past, its future). In designing the LandCRAFT logo, Luís Alves plays with the mismatch between the subnaturalistic embrace, the schematic sun and the stylized Côa Valley. Without being a painted scene or panel, the logo tells us about the conditions of the scenes and panels of Lapas Cabreiras; tells us about the figures, horizons and times of this prehistoric shelter. It tells us, then, about the memory conditions of this place. With its fiction, the logo tells us the truth of the desire for a memory that is yet to happen. In the film, the truth of this desire seems to insinuate itself between the play of scales and the con-fusion of voices; games and con-fusion that, through shifts of time, seek to open the conditions of the project's memory.
Happiness. These are images and sounds that speak of work and desire; they talk about the will of landcraft. In this catalogue of brief sequences of gestures and voices unfolded in games of distance, angles of vision and reflections are the conditions of this work and this desire; the limits and possibilities of the will. The film makes us wonder about the landscape, exploring the inconsistencies in the craft of archaeology. Along with this portrait, the film opens us to a feeling of nostalgia that makes us happy. We are overcome by nostalgia for a moment in which, transgressing all conditions and desires, we were left with nothing but the happiness of recognizing images on the surfaces of rocks.
