When a Language Falls Silent: Ecoar and the Art of Relearning How to Listen

Somewhere between the rhythm of Kimbundu and the quiet of colonial archives, a new sound begins to rise. It’s not exactly music. It’s a vibration — one that comes from the mouths of those whose grandparents were told to stop speaking. It’s the sound of Ecoar, a new festival born to reclaim what silence once swallowed.

Created by Banga Colectivo, an Angolan-led group of artists and architects based in Lisbon, Festival Ecoar asks one disarmingly simple question: what happens when a language goes quiet? From 8 to 11 November, between Lisbon and Sintra, workshops, performances and debates will explore the politics of memory, orality and identity — how the colonial ear reshaped the Lusophone world, and how listening can become an act of resistance.

The Afterlife of Silence

Portugal loves to think of itself as a bridge — between continents, between times, between worlds. But bridges are also borders, and for centuries, Portuguese was the language that crossed over while others were left behind.
In Angola alone, more than thirty national languages coexist with Portuguese. Some, like Kimbundu or Umbundu, carry entire cosmologies — ways of understanding the body, the forest, the community. Yet, as Yolana Lemos, Ecoar’s director, points out, “Portuguese became the language of school, of the state, of paperwork — not of the house, nor of intimacy.”

Ecoar is not nostalgia for pre-colonial purity. It’s a political gesture: a space to re-listen. By blending art, education, and memory, the festival wants to make the act of listening a form of decolonization. The aim isn’t to replace Portuguese, but to disarm its monopoly. “We want to think Lusophony from the margins, not the centre,” Lemos says — a line that feels like a manifesto in a time when diversity is often reduced to branding.

The Architecture of Orality

The name Ecoar — to echo — carries its own provocation. In a world obsessed with speaking, it calls for the opposite: to hear the residue. The event moves fluidly between installations, performances and pedagogical spaces, refusing hierarchy. At the Centro Cultural Olga Cadaval in Sintra, children will learn Kimbundu words from Sérgio Wayami, a linguist and activist. In a parallel installation titled Universidade da Oralidade (“University of Orality”), elders from the Angolan diaspora share stories outside any formal classroom structure — a symbolic counter-institution, built not of walls but of voices.

Banga Colectivo’s practice has always been architectural, but their architecture deals in echoes, not concrete. Earlier fieldwork in Angola brought them to Bailundo, where a soba (traditional leader) spoke of oral transmission not as folklore but as archive. From that encounter, they developed prototypes for installations that act as “listening devices” — spaces that record without extraction.

The Many Tongues of Resistance

Colonialism didn’t just impose Portuguese; it installed a hierarchy of knowledge. The state language became synonymous with intelligence, modernity, and progress — everything that the colonized were told they lacked. Ecoar inverts that. It treats every suppressed idiom as a cosmic language, a living algorithm for survival.

This becomes palpable in the sound performance by Angolan composer Victor Gama, who closes the festival. His instruments — made from recycled materials and inspired by traditional forms like the toha and vaka — turn music into ethnography, but with distortion pedals. It’s as if you could hear both past and future playing the same note, slightly detuned.

From Lisbon to Luanda, and Back

The Lisbon of today is not the Lisbon that colonized. Yet its cultural spaces still carry that gravitational pull — deciding who gets amplified and who remains background noise. In this sense, Ecoar is as much about Portugal’s decolonial reckoning as it is about Angola’s self-reconnection. The festival’s map — Lisbon, Sintra, Bailundo, Luanda — sketches a transatlantic conversation, one that reclaims Lusophony as a plural ecosystem rather than a nostalgic empire.

There’s a quiet beauty in the ambition. Ecoar doesn’t scream slogans; it whispers truths. It reminds us that every silenced word leaves a ghost, and every recovered sound reclaims a fragment of the world.

The Lingua of Tomorrow

Language death is often treated like a statistic — something UNESCO tracks with melancholy precision. Ecoar treats it as a creative emergency. The disappearance of a language, it suggests, is not just cultural loss but cognitive erosion: a shrinking of possibility. “Each language,” Lemos says, “is an archive of human experience. When one goes silent, the world becomes smaller.”

But festivals like Ecoar also prove that silence can be reversed. Through memory, through art, through the echo that refuses to fade. And perhaps that’s the point — that the future of Lusophony isn’t about who speaks Portuguese best, but about how we learn to listen again.