Tuesday: Tuning Into the Silence 

My flight from Belo Horizonte arrived in Lisbon at dawn. As I was leaving the airport, the winter fog was so dense I couldn’t see 50 meters ahead. The city was damp and opaque, completely covered by a mass of humidity that created a thick obstacle to vision. It felt like a presage: that week would be all about hearing. Watching, listening, and thinking of documentary as a realm of the sonic, a sound’s kingdom, sounded very stimulating. Five days without headphones. Five days with ears wide open. 

After a talkative four-hour road trip with old friends and new acquaintances from Portugal, Russia, Lithuania, and Brazil (all attending the seminar with around 150 other people, including artists, critics, students and programmers), we arrived in Odemira, the village in the Alentejo region that was receiving the seminar for the second year in a row. As I was entering the house I rented together with six friends, I was struck by a reigning silence. Although we were one block away from the road, there was no noise of cars passing by. I could hear several different animals from the neighborhood, from birds to cattle. Living in a tall apartment building in the center of a big city in Brazil, one gets used to a constant urban roar, as if that noise were the equivalent of silence. Here, I could hear my footsteps. Here, when I played a voice message on my phone, I had to turn down the volume. 

As weird as it sounds, the municipality of Odemira is the largest in Portugal, with a total area of 1720.60 km². But it is also one of the least populated zones of the country, mostly composed of spacious agricultural areas and dispersed small villages, ranging from a handful of houses (like the one we stayed in, called Aldeia da Bemposta) to a few streets (like Odemira, the main village that hosted all the activities of the seminar). Because of all that quiet, it was hard to fall asleep the first two nights. The tiniest noise sounded like a bomb in my ears. There was a mix of excitement and jet lag, for sure, but also something like a sonic shock—equivalent to the thermal shock of crossing hemispheres by plane and going from torrid summer back home to soon-to-be winter here. It would take a while for my body to tune into the quiet soundscapes of Odemira. 

That night, the opening screening at Cine-Teatro Camacho Costa, a cozy 230-seat theater, was Trinh T. Minh-ha’s What About China? (2022), a recent reworking of Hi8 footage shot in rural China in 1993–1994. In the film, images of communal architecture throughout the country are covered by four alternating voiceover readings in English by Xiaolu Guo, Xiao Yue Shang, Yi Zhong, and the filmmaker. Although the soundtrack is punctuated by other sounds, mostly fragments of folk songs, the sonic structure is dominated by those sober, poised voices. We see hundreds of living people inhabiting the houses, and we can perceive the sounds coming from their mouths. However, left untranslated, they become a constant mumble, so the four voices can describe, analyze, and ponder. We can hear the people’s voices but never understand them. 

When we think of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s vastly influential approach to documentary, famously stated in two sentences at the beginning of her 1982 film Reassemblage (“I don’t want to speak about. I just want to speak nearby”), it’s interesting to realize how speaking nearby, over the last four decades, has turned into speaking over. In What About China?, there is no possible nearness, because the experiences portrayed become a background for the voices to meditate on, about, and around China without any disturbance. 

Wednesday: “I Hear You”

The second day started with the first discussion of the seminar, at Banda Filarmónica de Odemira, a space that used to be a movie theater and is now the headquarters of the village philharmonic band. Before introducing guest artist Trinh T. Minh-ha, curator Stoffel Debuysere opened with some inspiring questions for the seminar, all pointing to a “sonic thinking.” One particularly resonated in my mind: “How can we avoid that words stay in the way of sound?” Although it is a question that would glide over the next days, a possible answer could not be found in What About China? How could we open ourselves up to the varied realm of the sonic when experiencing such a verbose film, structured by long, meaningful, articulated sentences?

After lunch, we gathered again at the Cine-Teatro to experience Expedition Content (2020), a sound piece for cinema directed by Veronika Kusumaryati and Ernst Karel. The 78-minute work is composed from an archive of 37 hours of recordings made in 1961 during a multimodal ethnographic expedition to West Papua to study the Hubula people, led by filmmaker Robert Gardner. Comfortably seated in the dark, we listen to myriad sounds, from rainy landscapes to swarms of bees, from (mostly untranslated) Hubula voices to the ubiquitous presence of the sound man, who constantly describes what he is about to record. The editing decision to keep the annotations is key: the recorder is a young Michael Rockefeller, heir to the legendary Standard Oil family, who becomes the piece’s protagonist.

The almost complete absence of images in the piece plunges us into deep listening, forcing us to think differently, even to find other vocabularies to discuss ethnographic film. What happens when cinematic violence is not a matter of overexposing angles and excessive viewing, but rather of overhearing and hungry listening? What happens when the people being studied are not immediately available objects we can see, but a roaring mystery, an opaque plethora of sounds compelling us to wonder?

What happens when we can listen to those in charge of listening? Through a practice of critical unarchiving, Expedition Content turns into an ethnography of the ethnographers. A pivotal moment comes with Rockefeller’s undisclosed recording of a booze-soaked crew party inside a tent, where an avalanche of bigotry, misogyny, and all sorts of violence comes out in their voices. We, as listeners, have a raw, disturbing access to the colonial dynamics between the expeditionaries and the local people, and it sounds like an unprecedented dive into the unspeakable meanders of Western ethnography. The piece ends with a translated fragment of a conversation among the Hubula, in which they comment on the arrogance of the White visitors, overturning the forces at work for a brief moment.  

I was still processing what we had just experienced in the movie theater when, back at the Banda Filarmónica, with the lights of the afternoon still entering the room, we watched three short films shot by Robert Gardner during that same expedition, titled Baliem Valley 1961. After Gardner spent his final years working on that material, the pieces were recently edited by Olivia Wyatt, with soundtracks constructed by Ernst Karel using the same archive of Rockefeller’s recordings. It felt like a sudden pulling out of the previous experience, as if now we were given the images that Expedition Content was so thoughtfully subtracting from us.

Karel’s interesting sound work, however, would soon be obliterated by the ensuing debate, the most heated of this year’s Doc’s Kingdom. In the beginning, some stimulating questions arose. If ocularity is the base of power, and sound is not exempt from that dynamics, how could we build a nonextractivist approach to listening? But soon the discussion would escalate to an erosion of the works, labeling them as inherently damaging. The curatorial decision to show the Gardner films, seen as old-school colonial ethnography, was questioned. At some point, a seminarian from Indonesia said that because of the absence of images, Expedition Content perpetrated a “double violence” on the people portrayed. Seeming overwhelmed by an unexpected wave of frontal criticism, both the curator and the filmmaker (only Ernst Karel was present to represent the works) would not respond. Karel would only say: “I hear you.”

The debate’s accusatory tone seemed to miss an opportunity to discuss the sonic forms of both pieces, but Debuysere and Karel’s silence was not salutary to the conversation either. One would expect that both the filmmaker and the curator, who decided to deal with such a dangerous, potentially problematic archive, would be prepared for some hard conversations. Sometimes, hearing is not enough.

The next screening at Cine-Teatro would be a double program with the most well-known artists featured at the seminar, Minh-ha and the Black Audio Film Collective. Rewatching Minh-ha’s Reassemblage after What About China? was revealing. The 1982 film still retains its energy of formal defiance and open provocation, especially when experienced after Gardner’s material. The counter-ethnographic gesture remains strong, mostly because it is never reduced to words. The editing is constantly shattering the unity by way of sudden repetitions and overfragmentation; the voiceover consists of sharp, rapid-fire aphorisms, abruptly interrupted by disturbing silences; there is an aggressive dissonance between image and sound; bodies are shredded and torn, but never used as a plain background for articulated meditation. Instead, the glass vivarium of ethnographic imagery is fractured, and Reassemblage invites us to hear that cracking sound and step on the shards.  

Stepping out of that cinematic turmoil, the talking heads of famous intellectuals in Twilight City (Black Audio Film Collective/Reece Auguiste, 1989) felt odd. The interviews, though, are just one of the threads in an essayistic collage on migrant life in London during times of urban redevelopment. The film includes a fictional letter (from a daughter to her mother in Dominica), archival material, and visual explorations of the city. Although it is not on par with BAFC’s stronger works, Twilight City has a strange, otherworldly electronic score by Trevor Mathison, which would keep echoing in my head for the whole week. For a film dealing with a strong feeling of displacement, that soundtrack couldn’t be more accurate. 

Thursday: Listening Nearby  

The next morning’s discussion was supposed to be about the previous evening’s screenings, but the day started with Marcia Mansur, Doc’s Kingdom’s director, addressing the participants with a speech on ethnography, its servitude to the colonial project, and the reexamining of that body of work from the 1980s on. She praised the materiality of the sounds in Ernst Karel’s work and his courage in opening up the archive. Although it was a brave move for her to address the giant elephant left in the room by the previous afternoon’s conversation, the monologue felt out of place, in the sense that it perhaps should have happened in the moment to leave space for debate among the participants rather than as a parenthesis in the beginning of the next day, when guest artists Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart were already waiting to discuss their works. It felt like the opportunity for dialogue was being closed, rather than opened. 

Debuysere then introduced “sonic architects” Mathison and Stewart, who raised thought-provoking questions around the generative powers and critical possibilities of sound. One would expect that, following a double program, both films would be put into dialogue, but that was not the case. Because Minh-ha was not a panelist, the possible associations between her work and the Black Audio Film Collective remained unspoken. However, someone from the audience compared the works of the BAFC and Ernst Karel, referencing how shamans go back to the place of pain, but with guidance, to conclude: “With the BAFC work I felt guided, while with Karel’s work, I felt alone.” 

From my point of view, the current obsession with words like guidance, care, and cure is a symptom of a compliant, easygoing relationship with art. Sometimes it feels like the underlying assumption in that kind of discourse is that the fractures of the world or the colonial damage could be healed with films. Art is not a Band-Aid. I would rather engage with artworks that leave the wounds of the world wide open. Works that create stimulating problems for us viewers and listeners, rather than the ones that vicariously solve them for us. 

My thoughts were echoed in the afternoon screening, which started with Susana de Sousa Dias’s masterpiece, 48 (2009). With the image band composed solely of mugshots of political prisoners of the 48-year dictatorship in Portugal, the sound acquires a breathtaking density. While contemplating the images for long minutes, we hear the testimonies of those portrayed in them revisiting their experiences decades later, and our listening is so intense that every silence, every gasp, every sudden change of tone turns into a moment of revelation. Dias creates a sonic space for listening nearby, a cinematic ambiance so delicate and intimate that, even though I haven’t listened to the film in more than a decade, I could still anticipate exactly the minute when one of the prisoners would burst into tears and laugh at the same time, remembering the post-revolutionary red flags that welcomed him at the Lisbon airport after the exile. 

Walking out of the cinema, I felt grounded and attuned to my senses. I couldn’t predict the leap I would experience in the next screening, composed of Dias’s Fordlândia Malaise (2019) and an excerpt of Fordlândia Panacea, a work in progress. Both pieces deal with the past and present of Fordlândia, a former company town built by Henry Ford in the Amazon forest in 1928. While residents tell various historical narratives in the soundtrack, claiming that their land is not a ghost town, the films glide over the space, mostly through drone images. The soundtrack of 48 is a work of patience and proximity, of refined attention and a profound sense of placement. The Fordlândia works feel rushed and distant, leaving us with the impression of a quick tourist visit. Here, the testimonies sound disembodied, like floating bits of extracted sound information feeding a flyover view of a territory.  

At some point in the public conversation at Banda Filarmônica, I expressed my longtime admiration for 48, made a comparison with the Fordlândia pieces,  and engaged in a dialogue with the guest artist. Maybe it is unfair to compare a major work, which took years in the making, to a piece resulting from a few days’ artistic residency. However, when programmed one after the other, in the same physical space, the two screenings compel us to compare. As Nicole Brenez would say, “a program is a declaration in favor of the actuality of the chosen films.” 

During the same public discussion, I would engage in another dialogue after being directly questioned by another participant, Anuj Malhotra. Referencing my initial praise of 48, he wondered if, instead of retelling the stories of horror, silence would be a better answer, and proposed a “collectively cultivated silence” as a political gesture for our times. I found that a beautiful idea, but I couldn’t help connecting it with the issues of “retraumatizing” that had been floating in the air since the Wednesday afternoon discussion. So I replied that considering the horrors of dictatorship in terms of individual trauma is a neoliberal way of thinking. For the participants of 48, telling their story is not a personal problem—it is a political duty. To this day, many of those responsible for the system of incarceration and torture of political prisoners in Portugal have not been brought to justice. 

Later on, continuing the conversation with Anuj on the street, I realized something. What were the militants of 48 doing in prison, if not collectively cultivating silence, by enduring years, sometimes decades of torture without saying a word? For them, back then, silence was, indeed, a political gesture, exactly as he proposed. Decades later, though, speaking up is not reliving individual trauma, but contributing to an ongoing struggle against oblivion. 

The night would end with a late screening of Handsworth Songs (1986), a pioneering film by the Black Audio Film Collective directed by John Akomfrah. The piece takes on the urban disturbances of October 1985 in Birmingham and London to create a plural cinematic tapestry of experiences, voices, and music, which collapses the univocal media narratives about the riots and plunges us into a dissonant multiplicity of archives, narratives, and poetic drives of a rich, diverse community of migrants. Handsworth Songs is a counter-information film, politically charged, and filled with images of violence, but the urgency of its message never narrows the sonic flow. On the contrary: it is a feast to the ears. 

Friday: “Free your mind… and your ass will follow” 

There was something different in the air of Odemira after the Thursday afternoon dialogues and the enormous amount of sonic energy liberated by Handsworth Songs. It felt like a turning point in the program, and the rest of the day would prove it. Early in the morning, instead of discussing or watching films, we gathered at Banda Filarmónica for a listening session. The first performance was Atmospheric Rivers (2024), by Ernst Karel, a work of live quadraphonic audio. While we listened to multichannel recordings of giant masses of floating water, resonating in the walls of the room and transporting us to distant whereabouts, I could witness a drastic change. Now, instead of the often tense atmosphere of public debate, people were sitting on the floor, lying down, often with eyes closed. Muscles were being stretched, as well as our minds.  

Before performing her work of live stereo audio, Vanishing Points (2023–2024), guest sound artist Matilde Meirelles approached the windows of the room and asked that they remain open during the session. As we listened to a beautiful, layered composition of semi-rural sounds and urban roar, from London tube lines to a quiet path surrounded by trees, the air flowed in, carrying the scarce noises of Odemira. For the past few days, as we entered that space, we would bypass the Social Security agency located in the same building, always busy with a long line of migrant workers speaking languages unknown to me. They seemed alienated from what was happening next door, as I was disaffected by their presence while engaging in the seminar activities. For the first time, that room sounded less isolated from the outside. We would still not share the same space, but now we could at least breathe the same air. 

The air of Odemira would make another special appearance in the afternoon, during the screening of The Tuba Thieves (2023), by guest artist Alison O’Daniel. Based on her experiences of being d/Deaf, the filmmaker proposed a different listening disposition: each of us was invited to inflate a balloon and hold it during the projection, so we could feel the sound through vibrations crossing our body, as people on the d/Deaf spectrum do.

The spectrum of cinematic forms of The Tuba Thieves is extremely large and varied, and it has been discussed before in Documentary. Loosely based on a news story of teenage thefts of instruments belonging to high school orchestras around Los Angeles, the film is a patchwork of speculative fiction, experimental ruptures on the relationship between image, sound, and text, perfectly rhythmed gags, and countless other gestures. The playfulness of the captioning work is particularly amazing. At some point, every caption feels like either a joke (“quiet air”), a poem (“vulnerable melody”), or both, constantly breaking our expectations about what it means to describe a sound. 

Did you ever wonder what happened to a classical music listener who walked out of the premiere of John Cage’s 4′33″ in 1952? In O’Daniel’s film, irritated by Cage’s refusal to play the piano, he goes to the nearby woods, takes off his shoes, and steps on the grass. Or, as prefer to think, deeply affected by the musical liberation of the sounds of the world by Cage, he wants more, and that’s why he leaves his seat in the auditorium and exits to the forest: to be able to experience noises with his whole body, and not just his ears. Just as we were doing with our toys made of latex and air. 

Before leaving the movie theater, I could witness the impetus liberated by The Tuba Thieves. The balloons were floating through the room’s atmosphere, thrown by the remaining listeners during the credits. I won’t forget those childish noises penetrating the quiet air of a movie theater. The day before, in the conversation with Mathison and Stewart, curator Debuysere wondered about the generative capacities of sound. Those balloons were the living image of what sound can activate. 

Exiting the cinema, we were invited to walk a little bit and go to a quiet, autumnal park for coffee. The effects of the change in the soundscape continued to appear. A group started doing yoga in a small circle. By the time we went back for the discussion, the circle was getting bigger and bigger. 

The conversation with O’Daniel was revealing, especially when she shared some life experiences that informed the construction of The Tuba Thieves. “The fragmentary structure of the film is how I experience the world,” she said, implying that she is always listening through dispersed bits of sonic and visual information. “I’m always in the zone of compensation,” she added. And so are we, experiencing the lacunary form of The Tuba Thieves. 

During the conversation, I remembered a time when I had a blind student in a film criticism workshop, and when I expressed my concerns about my inability to deal with his experience of the films, eager to translate as best as I could, he answered: “Don’t worry. I see films differently from everyone else. But don’t we all?” 

Friday would definitely be a refreshing day. The culmination of that process would happen after dinner, during an informal encounter at a bar in Odemira. A bunch of participants, especially the Latin Americans, were eager to dance, but the quiet, musicless soundscape wasn’t helping. Suddenly, someone spotted a boombox nearby, someone else went to talk to the friendly locals, and in a flash, there was a hand passing asking for coins, so we could chip in and rent the portable sound system for a while to play some reggaeton. Out of the blue, a wheelbarrow materialized itself, we put the boombox inside it for better acoustics, and the night finally sounded like a party. Excited by what was happening, I suggested we should temporarily rename the town “Odescuta”, a wordplay with ode, mira (to see) and escuta (to listen). The improvised party lasted a few minutes, enough to free our asses for a while, as the title of a famous Funkadelic album would say. When the battery died, technology seemed to play against our sonic desires. But this was no problem for us, experts in gambiarra¹. It would only take four people, four cellphones trying to play the same music at the exact same time, to create our own version of quadraphonic sound. “Ways of listening” never sounded so accurate to describe what we were experiencing. 

Saturday: From Sight to Sound 

After a memorable night of joy, we started the day with a screening of a restored copy of Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Naked Spaces: Living is Round (1985). In the film, we see images of several Indigenous peoples in six West African countries (Senegal, Mauritania, Togo, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Benin), while we listen to articulated voiceovers that build a sophisticated reflection about roundness in architecture, music, and living habits, based on anthropological studies of African cosmologies. 

Overcited and overused, the theory of speaking nearby frequently mistakes nearness with some sort of intimacy with—and even participation by—the filmed subjects in the tessitura of the film. This was never the case in Trinh T. Minh-ha’s work in Africa, and rewatching Reassemblage was a way of reassessing its true energy of provocation, rebelliousness, and deconstruction of the ethnographic gaze. 

But with Naked Spaces, it’s hard to tell why it is different from other expository, disaffected, merely curious treatments of Indigenous cultures. The text speaks of vibration, spiritual enervation, and drumming, but the voices (always in English) are rational, solemn and monotonic. For the hungry camera, there is no difference between a face and a jar. Completely silenced, frozen in time as sculptures, children gaze back at us, only to be disfigured for the sake of continuous meditation. Among the Dogon, houses take human forms, with eyes and mouths as windows and doors. In Naked Spaces, conversely, humans are not so different from pieces of furniture. The film is from 1985, three years after Reassemblage, but it sounds like it could easily be one of the targets of the previous film. 

After the debate, feeling suffocated by an overwhelming amount of words, I needed some air. So I decided to skip the afternoon activities, accepted an invitation from some Spanish and Mexican friends and went to a beach nearby, Zambujeira do Mar, to listen to the sea and enjoy ourselves a little. The seminar was inspiring and thought-provoking, but it was also extremely serious, so we desperately needed a break from solemnity. The afternoon soundscape was full of music, waves cracking on the rocks and a blast of inside jokes by my friend Eloísa Suárez. At some point, my friend Isabel Rojas had a fit of laughter for several minutes, and the sound of her laughing was one of the best sonic experiences I had that week.

Feeling fresh, we returned to Odemira for the final debate. At the lower floor of Mercado Municipal, beneath where we had our meals, guest artists and participants were randomly distributed into small groups. Márcia Mansur, who was acting as moderator, guided us to share evaluations about the seminar. At some point, she asked the programmers in the circle if we had some suggestions for the overall dynamics. 

I tried to say that, regarding the conversations, moderation is an art in itself, and not every good intellectual is a good moderator. Debuysere’s introductions were extremely valuable, in the sense that he kept grounding the discussions through some keywords and general questions about sound. But some improvement could come from a more active role of the moderators, proposing dialogues among participants, referring to questions made in the previous sessions, and creating bridges between ideas. About the program, I said that it seemed to have been organized through major narrative blocks, which sometimes generated a concentration in one artist at a time. Enhancement could come from more varied constellations—more double programs with different artists, for instance—so we could avoid the back-and-forth dynamics between the artist and the audience, and create more crossovers, more round discursive architectures. 

As we were approaching the end, it was inevitable to evaluate what that week meant to me. First, I have to confess that, on a very personal level and in terms of artistic discoveries, I was somehow disappointed. I already knew most of the major works programmed, and was not impressed by the ones I didn’t, with the glorious exception of The Tuba Thieves. I was also expecting more in terms of sonic variety within the film works. For instance, there were very few pieces that used sound in a cinematically intriguing, expanding way, as filmmakers such as Lucrecia Martel, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Paula Gaitán, Paz Encina, or Deborah Stratman would do. The sonic space of the movie theater often sounded narrowed to univocal sounds, or reduced to words. 

An important exception to the placelessness of the theatrical sound (besides the sound performances at Banda Filarmônica) was the first work I experienced at the seminar. Originally a two-part tape-slide show that premiered in 1983, Expeditions is a piece by the Black Audio Film Collective transferred to video and installed at Igreja da Misericórdia (Church of Mercy). Gathering samples from colonial imagery and ethnographic portraiture, the collective builds layered, thought-provoking visual compositions of image and text. Loose phrases (such as “the anxieties of colonial rhetoric”) fluctuate over Britain’s colonial memories, creating a fragmented narrative with an intricate soundscape composed by Trevor Mathison. Resonating in the walls, ambient noises and manipulated voices acquire a distinct sonic thickness, together with unexpected meanings. 

The grandeur of the church acoustics becomes both solemn and haunting, especially for a Brazilian ear. I couldn’t avoid relating to what was happening in Portugal at the end of the XVI century when the church was built. Colonial chills spread from British archives to my spine in Alentejo, and the ghosts sounded alive in the vestiges of catholic mural paintings I could glimpse in the dark. The welcoming silence of Odemira was now disturbed by ancestral specters. 

Despite some critical considerations, I felt very grateful to what the general framing of the program of this year’s Doc’s Kingdom did to my thinking and to my body. Displacing my senses from sight to sound, opening up my ears and compelling me to spend a week redirecting my attention to the sonic dimensions of documentary was a transforming experience. It will certainly influence my thoughts and my perceptions for years to come.  

After the final balances, we gathered again at the lower floor of the market to experience Dubmorphology, the closing sound performance by Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart. Somehow, most of this year’s seminar’s strengths were condensed within one hour of an incomparable aesthetic experience. Crossing samples of sound archives and musical fragments, layering voices and ambient noises, manipulating all sorts of gadgets and instruments in a sound table, moving across the room and installing an Afrodiasporic ritual, Stewart and Mathison reinvented space, time, and conviviality. 

I’ll never forget the image of an outside tree flayed by the wind, gazed upon through a glass window that was trembling with the vibration. Listening to the noise of an imminent crack, I couldn’t help but feel that those windows were about to break at any time, because the sound energy inside was just too intense. Mathison and Stewart transformed the cosmology of dub into a sonic bomb, a critical machine, a ritualistic endeavor in which we could experience the sound clashes between colonial violence and the generative powers of Black music altogether. A sonic plunge into the thickness of non-reconciliation. A dangerous, unsafe place, as great artists can sometimes create.

¹Gambiarra is a Brazilian word for a practice of makeshifts, an art of improvisation, of using technology against the grain, to create what you need with what you have. Here, you can read a piece on the Gambiologia collective, a group of artists practicing gambiarra as a form of art.

This piece was first published in Documentary’s Summer 2025 issue.