With the arrival of the global pandemic our interactions changed abruptly and we had to think about how to replace the encounters with women. Online meetings were not feasible. Participating in a video gathering had very little to do with the feeling of intimacy that we had lived in the circles before. We kept asking ourselves what to do. How to keep connected in some way during this difficult time? We came up with two solutions. Two projects that accompanied us throughout the year 2020.
One is the production of monthly podcasts that we call Nodecast and the creation of an Audio Novella.
To make the Nodecasts our inspiration was an persistent question: how to keep the feeling that we are together alive inside? We decided to use the tool of audio and started to create our own local podcasts. We feel that hearing each other's voices coming into our homes and our daily lives generates a special closeness.
We sent a call with questions to the women about how they were experiencing the isolation of the pandemic and they answered us sending in voice messages. From there we took to edit the answers into a episode creating a patchwork of our experiences. In the end, of course, our tutor Tânia returns to the scene to connect the theme of the episode with a technology theme.
The Audio Novella comes from a different restlessness: when we connect deeply with the women in the territory we also get in touch with the pain. Many women's pains. Many of us treading the same ground in silence. So many situations and unfortunately so common…
We felt the need to speak about these pains and decided to develop a fictional story freely inspired by the many accounts shared by local women. In a 6 episode radio soap opera format we accompany Sabrina, a young inhabitant of the Souzas district, in a saga of revelation and transmutation during the traditional Saint Rita's festival week. The show is 100% locally produced, from the scriptwriting to the acting, the recording and audio editing.