Projecto X: a journey inside ourselves and what we found when we arrived

Abstract

This article analyses and reflects upon a community music project that occurred in 2016 in Portugal. It involved a community of people with disabilities and a group of artists from different fields. The project’s promotors aimed to create a space in which differences were abated, social well-being was nourished and individual desires were fostered. This article endeavours to understand how artistic performance may provide opportunities for empowering less advantaged people and how it might have been achieved during this project. The reflections present in this article are based on the current literature on community music and are informed by other similar analysis of these kinds of projects.

The article starts with a brief description of the project and then elaborates on the term ‘community music’ and its relationship to this project. The project made use of a mix between an art installation and an experimental instrument called Pianoscópio. This article describes this instrument in detail and analyses how it enabled the participants to express themselves to their fullest abilities. A characterisation of the participating community members follows, focusing on the core tenets of the association they were part of. After that, the article examines how the workshops took place and what transpired in the final performance, focusing specifically on the steps taken to accommodate the different disabilities of the participants. The article ends with a reflection upon these kinds of projects and the impact this one project might have had on its participants.