Meet Ricardo Baptista | Musician, Collaborative Projects

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ricardo Baptista and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ricardo, every day, we about how much execution matters, but we think ideas matter as well. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
It wasn’t a planned thing. I come from an Education Sciences background, I was a music teacher for a long time and got very involved with my schools’ communities, doing a lot of immersive work, devising art projects with very diverse groups. Gradually, the education system in Portugal started to make processes and accessibility difficult, the bureaucracy started to seem too heavy, and at that time I was already being invited to conceive and coordinate projects outside the school… so I realized that I could do what I really loved to do in other contexts. I met my wife then, going through a similar phase, coming from the cultural management area. We were both on the European Capital of Culture organization and when it finished, we started feeling that maybe the way to go for both of us would be to start our own company, where we could explore the things that interested us: art, places and community. We weren’t completely sure of what that business would be, and people didn’t understand easily what we were set to do, but ondamarela was born, anyway, and we started doing a bunch of cool stuff. After a few years, it was clear that there was a place for our artistic aproach, as much as a market for what we do. And we are very happy, we meet new people all the time, we work with art and culture, and we think a lot about places, cities, countries: it’s great!

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
There’s a definition of community by Ferdinand Tonnies as “the feeling of us”. A community may be tied by history, language or familiar bonds, but if you take the “feeling of us” idea, you can imagine a community being formed in a less dense way, being perhaps ephemeral, happening inside a bus full of strangers, for example. So, I believe that a great way to create this new communities is to collaboratively invent something. The magical act of creating from the input of everyone is very transformative, individually and in groups – it is the building together of something that everyone identifies with, of something bigger than the sum of the parts that inspires you to exceed. My aim is to create things collaboratively, music mostly, creating new communities in the process. Also, we always try to put on the same stage people that wouldn’t be together if it wasn’t for the project, creating from diversity, from dialogue and confrontation… and music is particularly good for that. I love how an idea can start from a funny joke and be discussed, molded, transformed, completely shattered and becomes something else, sometimes really serious and dense stuff, in front of everyone’s eyes: that’s really inspiring. I work almost every time in open door projects, meaning anyone can join, independently of age, background or skill. Everyone can have an important input on the creative work.

Through this work I realized that there are some important obstacles to this work: the lack of democratic values is one of them. We’ve done work in less mature democracies and it’s clear the struggle to create from a free ground, to speak openly, to debate all questions, to address prejudice. With those and other obstacles, I try to operate with a kind of secret weapon: Empathy. The availability to imagine yourself in the other’s shoes can be something that you throw into a (even musical) debate and provoke an interesting effect. Usually, a good one.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I live in Guimarães, the city where Portugal actually started. So there’s the obvious and fundamental things to visit: the castle, the palace, the marvellous medieval old town, the beautiful Alberto Sampaio museum. You can eat very well in Guimarães, in restaurants like Cor de Tangerina, Florêncio, Neca Magalhães, Sala 141, Cantina. But then there’s the other aspects of the city: the great contemporary museum, CIAJG, or CAAA, also the Cultural Center Vila Flor or my favourite (and hidden) area of the city: Couros. Here, for more than 1000 years there was a huge extension of tanks and tanneries, kind of like in Marrakesh and we still can spot them everywhere. The river passes there and a walking route is lovely and very different, I think. Our office is nearby so I’m fotunate to walk there a lot.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Well, first, ondamarela is a project I created with my wife, a dream we had together and that was built around the two of us, our skills and our aims. There’s no way I would be doing the kind of work I am doing now, if it weren’t for Ana. She is the catalyst of everything I do right now and a great inspiration, every day. My family has a huge impact on the way I see the world: my parents and sister, but also my children. Also, we are very fortunate to make art with communities, institutions, people that show us, daily, the good side of humanity, the effort towards the common good. A lot of anonymous, strong, incredible people. I value this a lot as the role of an artist is to inspire others. So I get very inspired by the work of Tim Steiner (strokestra, for example), the books by Cortázar, the life of Pete Seeger, the music of José Afonso.

Website: ondamarela.pt/en

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ricardo_ondamarela/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ricardo-baptista-6b128525/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ondamarela

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ondamarela

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJY8g_JUq7KLcLHho9YdBEg

Other: https://enterraemterra.com/ https://bolha-bolha.bandcamp.com/ https://youtu.be/dxUJh0Umv1o

Image Credits
Paulo Pimenta Pedro Sardinha Vera Marmelo Renato Cruz Santos Vasco Mendes