In search of the PluriverseIn search of the Pluriverse

Before we travel to Asturias, we decide to make a pitstop in Madrid and visit the headquarters of INLAND: CAR, (Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural, Centre For Approaching The Rural). Back in 2009, Fernando Garcia Dory started an agro-cutural-artistic community in Asturias. This was one of the reasons for us to set up our pluriversal camp in this region. This initiative evolved into a much bigger, international movement: INLAND/Campo Adentro, linking territory, culture and social change. While Fernando Dory travels the world to manifest and communicate the ideas of INLAND, Amelie Aranguren runs the Madrid office, which turns out to be much more than that. A house, a home, a neighbourhood hub… A talk about cheese as a narrative, transhumance, worthless wool, tensions around common pastures and foremost: making valuable and durable connections.

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We have arrived in Asturias! We stay in a wonderful former ‘casería’ (farm house), turned into a residence: PACA, Projectos Artisticos Casa Antonino. The farm house is about 15 minutes riding from the (post)industrial city of Gijón/Xixón. Before our guests arrive we have time to walk around the premises and talk with Virginia López, founder of PACA and our contextual guide for this week.

In this talk we learn more about the region and reasons why Virginia returned to her home ground. A talk about forgotten connections between people, animals and crops and the confused state of the landscape as a result of this. We look at Virginia’s artistic practice and her role as placemaker. López sees herself as an outgoing swarm of bees and a solitude seeking hermit at the same time. Where will this paradox take her in the near future?

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Our guests, Ana Carreño, Chiara Sgaramella, Pascale Gatzen and Cynthia Hathaway have arrived. Before we dive into our 1 on 1 conversations, we try – as always – to truly arrive where we are. To ground, to temporarily root and sprout. To share this ‘vertical field trip’ we take you on a sonic tour. From Madrid's busy café's, to our cross-country train ride. Once you arrive in Asturias you witness a morning full of farm stuff and in the afternoon Ana Carreño takes us (and you dear listener!) on a silent sound walk through the industrial landscape that surrounds the farmhouse we stay in. And what a loud landscape it is! Enjoy.

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Ana Carreño takes us to a public beach in Gijón/Xixón that is sandwiched between two industrial sites. While we look for a spot for our interview we pass three women on a bench. One of them is singing. She says she used to sing a lot when she was young. Singing is a rural tradition. As a young woman she moved to Gijón/Xixón for work and stopped singing.

A job in the mines or the steel industry was an escape from rural poverty. But since the 80s, when Spain joined the EU after the Franco regime ended, mines were closed and industry declined. Architect and researcher Carreño studies the post-industrial landscape. What happens when the activity disappears, but memories and remnants are still present? This spatial confusion – or ‘heterotopia’ as Michel Foucault calls it – comes with challenges and opportunities. Carreño grew up here, her grandfather drove the coal train from the mines in Avilés to the harbour of Gijón/Xixón. What kind of future does she picture for this shrinking city? How to deal with degrowth?

We dive into the economic history of the region and talk about the current spatial quality of the city. We look at the revitalisation of Bilbao: from industrial community to cultural hub. But not every jobless mineworker can become a barista in a glossy coffeeshop. We also touch upon Ana’s own practice as an architect and artist. Does she consider heterotopia as her habitat?

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We asked Chiara Sgaramella to join our Asturias edition because her practice as an artistic researcher focuses on the connection between art and agriculture. She was born and raised in the heel of Italy’s boot, but currently lives and works in Valencia, Spain. Sgaramella sees art as an integrated part of daily life, as a collective effort. From this perspective she studies the relations between soil, food and culture. We all know paella as a dish, but what do we know about rice production in Spain? When and how did rice arrive as a crop in Europe? Chiara developed a traveling trolley about the subject / this question.

A talk – that took place in the hazel forest close to PACA – about eco-feminist art, the Zapatistas, radical interdependency and the impact of scarcity.

Immediately after the group talk (#8) Sgaramella needed leave for Piemonte, Italy, where she took part in a 1 year residency. Chiara worked with abandoned tools, found in a barn. She reproduced these ‘extensions of farmers hands’ in large prints, as an ode to agricultural gestures.

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We decide to have the conversation in a parked car, with an enormous hand made world-of-wool-map on our lap. As if we are on an imaginary road trip through Cynthia Hathaway’s practice. It fits her way of working: creating fun, momentum and dialogue. Canadian born Hathaway came to the Netherlands in the late 90ies. She calls herself an artistic ‘searcher’ without the re- attached. Always looking for surprising angles and ways to connect different fields of working and thinking. From miniature trains to giant vegetables, from founding a disco in an academic institute to growing potatoes to embody Gilles Deleuze’s Rhizomatic thinking. Her latest intervention: a wool march. A walk with a herd of 250 sheep, shepherds and dogs straight through the center of the Dutch textile city Tilburg. To raise awareness for lost connections between humans, animals and landscape.

A talk about the art of not knowing, the dedication of amateurs, the loud Asturian hills, the global versus the local and the ongoing beat of disco music. Yeah.

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Pascale Gatzen fell in love with fashion as a child, became a designer and quickly fell out of love with the competitive, capitalistic fashion system. In New York she co-founded the workers cooperative Friends of Light that fabricated custom made woven jackets from local wool. This experience evolved into the Dutch ‘Linen Project’ an – also – cooperative attempt to create a value chain from growing organic flax to making linen products with the harvested and processed fibres.

Collaboration comes with communication. Gatzen got interested in ‘empathic communication’ and made that the core of an artistic Master she set up in Arnhem, The Netherlands.

A conversation about getting in touch with felt emotions and underlying needs (what Pascale calls ‘compassionate communication’), ‘should thoughts’, the successful Mondragon cooperative and the love for making beautiful things that will never fade.

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Eager to find out even more? These references were good companions on this trip.

After living a week under one roof, working collectively at the farm, walking together in silence, sharing breakfasts, dinners and thoughts, the group talk comes quite naturally. Here we are: Chiara, Ana, Pascale, Cynthia, Sophie and Erik, sitting in a circle in the shade of the biggest building in Spain, built during the Franco regime: Universidad Laboral de Gijón. After a tour of art center LABoral and a soothing minute of silence we look back on the days we spent together.

A talk about capitalism and workers cooperatives, about poverty and looking for a better future by walking away from the harsh rural life. About the pros and cons of the revitalisation of industrial cities as Bilbao and Aviles. What did we learn, what do we take home? These are complex and confusing times, but our talk ends on a positive note: united we stand, plants and humans, and however small, changes can be made. There might me no ’them’ in capitalism, this week there was definitely an ‘us’.

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