Outside of three important interviews, the reason for this trip is to get quality visual material that will convey much of the story. On Saturday, I filmed for a couple of hours during a boat ride on the Douro around the area of Porto and Gaia courtesy of Oscar Quevedo, complementing two previous ones in other areas of the river.
I’ve been long fascinated with the symbolic and psychological meaning of water, and have used it in videos and paintings. In wine, rain, and sometimes hail, will determine the quality of the year’s crop. And in the Douro in particular, “pipas” (large casks) of wine were loaded on boats, moved to the warehouses in Gaia, and then shipped out on the Atlantic to the UK and elsewhere.
If the terraced Douro valley slopes has a sense of enduring stillness and timelessness, it is water that shows the cycles of life and nature and man, and hopefully images of water will transmit that movement through the Douro, and through life.
