Disintegration Culture. Representations of the North Coast of Viana do Castelo

André Castanho

Disintegration Culture is a metaphor meant to describe the changes occurring in a specific sample of the North Coast of Viana do Castelo. The abandonment of the agricultural structures and areas are translated into Disintegration, as a tool for a specific look over a specific territory. Recognizing that the current territory, and its sample, are the result of several inscriptions and transcripts over time, we develop an exercise of representation and interpretation, based on successive in-situ surveys and in the construction of Maps and Photographs of Disintegration. These contents are forms of expression fof an alternative language that seeks for updated critical envolvement, through a physical and temporal rooting. Maps and Fotographies are presented in three processes, Processess of Disintegration allud to three different forms of human intervention in the cycles of Disintegration and consequently in the territory: Grafting, Composting and Sowing. These Processes emphasize different levels that relate the territory and culture with society and the individual expression that changes it. On Grafting, we give visibility to the changes occurred mainly on the slope of the sample and derived from the expansion of Viana do Castelo. We identify the components of Grafting, the Horse and the Branch, and two different techniques, the Fork Graft’ and Plate Graft. These situations challenge the adaptation and integration of new models of building, successors of urban expansion, with the pre-existence rural pattern. In most of these cases, this relation is established through severe strategies of removing and cracking the pre-existent pattern, which results in heterogeneous structures making tabula-rasa of the reality that they will integrate. In the second process, Composting, reffers to the Disintegration of the waterfront and of coastal activities as instigators of the Disintegration itself. In this sense, we establish a path that leads to the analyzes of three different composting applications: the Foliar Composting, as a form of surface fertilization; the Fractionated Composting, which involves periodic intervention regimes, and the Fund Composting, which is respective to the pre-emergence of the culture and the tilled soil. Within this, we state practices of appropriation that nowadays mark the waterfornt, between waste deposti and the construction of a sports field. Once again we reconstruct the pre-existing pattern to illustrate a balanced situation between population and territory. We end with Sowing. In this content, we point to the Disintegration of the plain and the three levels enunciated are: the Sow, the Sower and the Seed. With this process we look for the disintegration of the agricultural structure. The research around the parcel structure demonstrates how the issue of ownership conditioned the modernization of small farm units. From the deep rurality that characterized that sample during Estado Novo, emerged the necessity of urgent integration in the global markets and in Community politics (PAC). The current situation draws an abyss between the political programs advertized and funds invested with the generalization of the abandoned parcels. In the center of this question is the property regime, which still sustains monetary profits over the simple ownership of cultivable land. Finally, we conclude with Gleaning while formulate and present the respective syntheses to Disintegration of the North Coast of Viana do Castelo. This last chapter refers to our intervention in the Culture, which through the process of gleaning concrete data and physical experiences, builted a critical instance and, possibly, operative for the recognition of this territory.