The City Museum’s new website is online and features “Diário da Peste" this evening

The reading of the “Diário da Peste”, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, is broadcasted this evening at Rádio Estação, available on the City Museum new website, online at www.museudacidadeporto.pt.

The City Musuem (Museu da Cidade) launches its new website this evening, as the result of a project that has been presented to the city, last year around this time. And what follows is an extension of the museum itself, which takes on a rhizome-like model that avoids the causality concept to its definition, and acts more like each station being an original in itself.

There are no in-person Museum and public interactions, owing to the pandemic restriction measures, which includes a new lockdown. The City Museum encompasses seventeen stations, from the Pasteleira Reservoir to the Quinta de Bonjóia (future “Extensão da Natureza”), and the necessary connection that is momentarily interrupted due to the pandemic, is restored by connecting these stations and the audience by means of a broadcast session of the first reading of “Diário da Peste”, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, today at 10 pm. These readings will happen on a daily basis.

The texts included in the “Diário da Peste” have been published by the newspaper Expresso during the first confinement and were almost immediately translated to several languages. According to Gonçalo M. Tavares, the fact that he had to “take in what was happening and react to it”, was an unprecedented experience, almost as a live writing. “It was brutal as regards both reality and writing; I have never been so close to what was truly happening”, asserts Gonçalo M. Tavares, on the project that will be exclusively broadcasted by Rádio Estação, in the midst of the second confinement.

As for the new website, visitors will be able to explore each of the stations, the collection they integrate, the bureaus that could be opened last year, when so much was denied culturally wise (in videos that invite to guided tours in the project “Visitações”). Visitors are also invited to contribute with ideas and comments on how to further this ongoing-museum, via the “Gabinete Atmosférico”, the main interface during the pandemic.

The website is also available through the “sítio invisível", a sort of open window that Rádio Estação provides to audiences, following the success of the first experience during Porto Book Fair 2020. The emphasis is on sound level, therefore, as the pandemic constraints prevent in-person events and connections; this is also an optimal opportunity to ponder on the relevance of the physical object in a museum space. Rádio Estação wil be the means to listening and recounting, as “radio and voice enable the time to digest and reflect through the earpieces, which is very much linked to the capacity for reflexion”, explains the writer, adding that “it is important to reset the impact of sound and word in reflection, in contrast with the shelling of images that often times also flash on and immobilize”.

Rádio Estação establishes ongoing collaboration network

Rádio Estação kicks off with a set of initiatives and marks the first step to building an ongoing network of collaborators. The initiatives are developed with artists and musicians Tomás Cunha Ferreira and Domenico Lancelotti, who have created from the outset the section "Colapso", crafted the collaboration with Rádio Sonoplasmática, and established a partnership with “Fonoteca Municipal do Porto” (aka Porto Municipal Audio room) that invites to know some of the best albums from its extensive archive; also, João Salaviza and Renée Nader Messora will who feature experiences from the other side of the ocean, and “Matéria Prima” brings "Arca", which works as a craft that explores the local creativity and challenges all quietness.

This ongoing radio also offers listeners “Pólen", a project that captures the landscape that surrounds the city and the museum stations, or even a partnership with the “Colectivo Espaço Invisível”, directed by Nuno Preto and Samuel Coelho, which comprises other musicians and sound artists, as well.

As of 1 am, the nocturnal hour broadcasts the "Fim de Emissão" and offers self-generative compositions, authored by artists. The first one is signed by Pedro Augusto.