The connection I have with Santa Maria da Feira, where I was born, was strengthened when I moved to the centre of Porto. The icons of this place have a strong influence on my work and my artistic practice. After working with the municipal market as a catalyst, I adopted the Vouga train as the driving force behind my essentially photographic work. Recently, the river Cáster, which humbly bathes Feira, has reactivated my gaze and memory. In search of its springs, which I had never seen before, I looked on Google Maps, where I thought I could find almost anything; I got no results. A Google search never led to the site’s coordinates or to sufficient directions to find it, I only found what I already knew: Sanfins.
I then started contacting friends and acquaintances in the Sanfins area in search of someone who could take me to the springs, and, after a few contacts, I found the telephone number of Alberto Tavares, who was born and raised in Sanfins. Mr Alberto promptly offered to clear the Sanfins bushes with me, and he too took his machine, and we went to two of the three springs that form the Cáster River. The other was covered by a housing development that even Mr Alberto couldn’t identify very well. But together we made our way to the Vergado and Santo Aleixo springs and the place where they all come together in the Cáster River.
In this work, I reflect on what a spring is and what being born in Sanfins says about a river. Quickly, all the people I met on this journey blended in with the river, as did the infrastructures I came across along the way.
The narrative I chose in the sequence of images is drawn along the route guided by Mr Alberto (who appears in the second image), passing by the abandoned Multi Desportivo de Sanfins, just a few metres from the Santo Aleixo spring, the Vergado tank and, particularly important, the “water house”.
The “water house” was the distribution centre for water from the Cáster, when it was still consumed in Feirense. It was a place that immediately absorbed me. There, the water flows with considerable force and passes through a structure that was once a treatment centre but is now useless. It simply exists, the water flows, abundant and clean, and it doesn’t go anywhere.
