The Project

What the guidebook leaves out

Every region has places whose value is already recognised. They have a name, a known history, sometimes a sign pointing towards them, and a meaning that precedes our encounter with them.

Alongside them are many others that do not ask to be observed. They are not monuments, and often have nothing exceptional to show, but people’s lives have passed through them: someone lived there, worked, waited, met someone, repeated the same gesture every day or cherished something that might have seemed insignificant to others.

Time can erase these relationships without erasing the places that held them. What remains is a house whose inhabitants we no longer know, a door whose key-holder is unknown to us, a railway keeper’s house without the railway worker who spent his days there, a vineyard without the people who knew every row.

Brivadi Narra works within this distance between what is still visible and what risks no longer being so.

Not everything old has a story

Turning our gaze towards what we usually ignore carries a risk: beginning to see meaning everywhere.

A ruin does not become important merely because it is old, and an abandoned house does not necessarily have a story worth telling. Brivadi Narra does not seek to lend poetry to every ruin, nor to construct an imaginary village in which every stone holds a secret.

Behind some places, people, relationships, gestures and events emerge that can restore meaning to them; behind others, nothing may emerge. Recognising this difference is also part of the research.

Before the story

Every Brivadi Narra story begins with something that exists, or once existed, in the real territory: a building, a photograph, an object, a testimony, a memory shared by someone, a trace still visible, or something time has almost completely erased.

Before writing, we must observe the place, listen to those who remember it, gather accounts and information, compare different versions, and try to understand which relationships gave meaning to what we see today.

Memory, of course, is not a perfect archive. People forget, confuse dates, remember the same event differently and sometimes unconsciously fill what time has left empty. For this reason, testimonies are not treated simply as evidence, but as part of a process of research that brings them into relation with photographs, documents, places and other memories.

Research does not serve to prove that a story exists, but to discover whether there is something worth telling.

When research becomes storytelling

Brivadi Narra is not, however, a historical archive. Once the traces have been gathered, storytelling comes into play, creating scenes, characters and situations through which readers can enter into a relationship with what the research has brought to light.

This is a delicate step, because telling inevitably means transforming. A story may bring distant elements together, imagine an encounter, or entrust a character with a question no document has ever recorded; it should not, however, arbitrarily invent the meaning of a place.

The distinction between reality and narrative construction is therefore not a limitation to conceal, but an essential part of the project: research seeks the traces; storytelling tries to make them perceptible.

Brivadi Narra takes shape between these two moments.

The empty space need not be filled

Photographs also take part in this inquiry. Their task is not to prove what the text tells, nor to turn Brivadi into a destination to admire, but to give readers back the time they need to observe.

This is why the images may show empty streets, houses without people, closed doors, quiet fields and places where nothing seems to happen. Emptiness is not meant to create a nostalgic village or erase the present: it reduces distractions and allows traces of the lives that passed through those places to emerge.

Emptiness, silence and absence are not what the story lacks. They can be the space a story needs to be heard again.

Why Brivadi

Brivadi was not chosen because it was unique. The project begins here for a simpler reason: this is a place known from within.

Living in a place means being able to walk through it over time, knowing people who still hold its memories, knowing whom to ask and being able to return to the same story again and again. Many of the traces Brivadi Narra works with still exist because someone remembers them, and become accessible through relationships that require closeness and trust.

There is another condition alongside this one. Many everyday places in Brivadi do not reach our eyes accompanied by established meanings: a house, a vineyard, a street, a doorway or an old railway keeper’s house does not immediately tell us why it should matter. This leaves a space between what we see and what the place may have meant to those who lived it.

It is within this space that Brivadi Narra chooses to work, focusing above all on places whose meaning is not handed to us before we even encounter them.

A question that begins in a real place

Brivadi Narra is a cultural research and storytelling project devoted to the relationship between places, memory and meaning. It uses testimonies, traces in the landscape, photographs and narrative construction to explore what may survive of people’s lives in the places they passed through.

Brivadi is where this research could begin, not an exception that needs proving. And for that very reason the question can reach beyond its boundaries: how many things disappear not when they are demolished, but when no one can any longer recognise what they meant?

Brivadi Narra does not seek to turn what usually goes unnoticed into something exceptional. It looks for what remains of the lives that passed through it and, through storytelling, tries to restore space to what risks becoming invisible.

The aim is not to make Brivadi exceptional. It is to look at it long enough that it need not be.