And we were mountain. A visual and textual account of the Sentires do Monte ritual

(Le en galego aquí, lee en castellano aquí).

This art project arises within the framework of the project Terra Común de Concomitentes with the mediation of the researcher and cultural curator Natalia Balseiro and with the participation of the president of the Community of Montes de Couso Xosé Antón Araúxo; together with them about three hundred people have been participating in more than thirty meetings, work sessions, walks through the forest, parties or learning days. 

The collective desire defined by these commoners, neighbors of Couso, after months of collective deliberations was: “to put in value their legacy among the closest neighbors and the youth, with the idea of guaranteeing the generational relay”.

The invitation to Asunción Molinos Gordo (1979, Aranda de Duero, Burgos, Spain), researcher and visual artist, was to respond to this collective desire, through an art project generating new links with the bush. She is an artist with a tremendously open and situated formalisation in her art projects, who works from a perspective strongly influenced by the methods of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, and whose main focus of her work is the contemporary peasantry.

To compose the art project, Asunción was accompanied for eight months by some twenty community members, as well as neighbours and members of other mountain communities, who formed the working group that participated in the design of the Fiesta-Ritual. 

Being together, opening new conversations and generating links through a series of visits, walks, interviews, informal meetings and writing exercises (odes, letters, municipal banns, hand kisses, letters of rights and other writing tools) that were composing other forms of union with the mountain, the essential elements of the mountain were decanted to form the ritual: water, totemic animals, herbs, air-oxygen, food, firewood, fire, horses, ancestors and memory.

1st ACTION: call to the Mountain

With these elements and deep research work on each one of them, the Fiesta-Ritual is made up of a series of actions that began in the Mirador de San Antoniño after the call to clean the mountainain by the oldest members of the community with the Buguinas from A Guarda, recovering an ancient method to call community members to clean the mountains. The call to the mountainain was made by Iria Enríquez Blandón, Paloma Amigo García, Pepe Reñones Rodríguez and Luis Alonso Bagacigalupe. 

2nd ACTION : Water

They walked together to the source of the Couso River where the water that makes life possible in this area originates. Xosé Antón Araúxo, José Manuel Lago, Iria Enríquez Blandón and Asunción Molinos Gordo shared ancestral and collective knowledge and practices about what water can do, presenting the Rabilonga or the horse that signals drinking water. They unveiled the practices of planting water and performed gestures in community inspired by the irrigation communities, where water is shared among all beings.

3rd ACTION: Food

They ate together, celebrated that they are here and alive. They put their bodies to make the feast, the rite and the ritual their own. A stop at the Souto Chan das Eiras where they shared the food offered by the mountainain: one hundred kilos of wild boar donated by the Sociedade de Caza la Gondomarense, cooked by the specialist cook in game meat Eva Florentiña from Gondomar, washed down with house wine from the vineyards of the villages linked to the mountainain and accompanied by chestnut and mushroom pies from the mountainains of Couso cooked between the Bar Gondomar and the Bakery O Penisco (Gondomar).

4th ACTION: Regueifas

The young people from Gondomar Alba Herranz Pazos, Mar Herranz Pazos, Carmen Villanueva Rey, Paula Piñeiro Gonzalez and Ruth Comesaña Granja, all of them students of 4thESO of the IES Plurilíngüe Terra de Turonio - performed conflicts of the mountain, of yesterday and today, through several regueifas composed by themselves with the help of the regueifeiro of Godomar Luis Caruncho and the teacher and artist Elena Gómez Dahlaren. These five young women composed the lyrics of this verbal game about the love affairs in the forest that continue to exist since ancient times, but also about the distance between the administrative bureaucracy of forest management and the reality of neighbours who live the forest every day as a teacher, as a family member, as a companion.

5th ACTION: The herbs

A group of women made up of Sara González López, Pilar Talariz Cobas, María Lemos Cerqueira, Susana Sáiz Medinger, Monste Salgueiro Varela and Lucila Rial Prado shared their knowledge and experiences about medicinal herbs and their different food, medicinal, spiritual uses... They also prepared, together with Elisa Diego Diaz from the Bar of the Casa Veciñal de Couso, different herbal teas made from herbs that used to be found in the Couso Mountains and are nowadays found in the vegetable gardens and gardens of the neighbours. These infusions were sweetened with honey donated by the Community of Montes de Vincios through Montse Salgueiro Varela.

6th ACTION: Horses and young people

Sheila Ribero Rodríguez, Olivia Dawod Molinos, Paula Piñeiro González and Adrián Alonso Docampo, the youngest members of the community, mountained on the horses of Suso and José Alonso Santos and Paco León guided us through the mountain, to the burial place of the ancestors of Couso, the oldest members of the community. 

7th ACTION: Mámoa

Jesús Rodríguez Dieguez traced a journey through what are today, for Couso's neighbours, the mámoas; collective burial constructions in the upper part of the mountain that their ancestors chose to bury their commoners. 

8th ACTION: The bagpipes, the third lung 

The artist Mercedes Peón composed a performative and sonorous space within the Fiesta-Ritual with the Pipe Band Nuevos Aires de Couso from the mámoa at the foot of Monte do Facho. The bagpipe players Marcos Castro González, Jose Lago Villa, Fabio Duran Dios, Nicolas Abaldes Lorenzo, Jesús Abaldes Pérez, José Antonio Hermida Pérez, Andrea Gomes Rodríguez, Nayara Fernández Benites and Javier Abalde made the fol of the bagpipe sound as if it were a third lung, emulating their breathing through the mountain, as our ancestors did, when there was no electricity, to scare away the fear with their bagpipes. At the foot of the mountain they played the piece that Peón composed for them as an offering to the Montes de Couso. 

9th ACTION: Firewood

Basilio Calzado from the Comunidade de Montes de San Salvador shared with us his knowledge and learning about how to collect firewood to light the fire and what other uses the woody plants of the mountain, such as pine cones and gorse, had. After his indications, the whole group took a bundle of firewood to climb Monte do Facho and burn it in a collective, communal bonfire.

10th ACTION: Fire 

They ended up at the top of Monte do Facho, making a common bonfire to illuminate, as their ancestors did to the neighbouring communities of the sea, as a lighthouse, the community of Couso mountains illuminated the mountain, they let themselves be seen, we are here, we are alive, we are together, we continue to know our mountain, generating new links with it and between us and today we come to listen to it.

11th ACTION: Plan for the Protection of El Monte 

Iria Enríquez Blandón, one of the youngest community members, read a poetic adaptation that the artist Asunción Molinos Gordo wrote of the Plan de Autoprotección del Monte, also written by the artist herself, based on the work sessions held with community members, neighbours and people from other mountain communities. It is a legal document that aims to inspire other forest communities to protect this common good, which is so valuable for life. 

A rite that marks a beginning

In addition to this ritual festival, which is planned to be an annual event, the artistic process also takes the form of a Self-Protection Plan for the Mountain that recognises the rights of these mountains and which has been designed by the artist on the basis of the collective work sessions.

A document, inspired by other similar processes such as the Law approved in 2022 to grant legal personality to the Mar Menor in Murcia and the Tins de Outes River in Galicia, which seeks to safeguard the future of these territories managed by the commoners, and thus inspire other similar models.

The content of this Self-Protection Plan, the result of various meetings between the artist, mediator and the working group, made up of members of the community, neighbours and members of other mountain communities, will include topics such as the care, protection, use, production and transmission of knowledge in the territory.

In addition, in the last working session of the Terra Común project, scheduled for December, the Couso Mountains Community will receive the protocol through which they commit themselves to give continuity to this Festival-Ritual every year, keeping it alive, changing, adapting it to their needs and to the times, but living it together, in communion. 

Asunción Molinos Gordo. A work revolving around the peasant world

The researcher and visual artist, Asunción Molinos Gordo, has developed an artistic oeuvre that revolves around rural cultures and the international peasantry. She has produced work connected with the transformation of agrarian labour, the impact of biotechnology, international food trade, transhumant architecture and the protests of the peasantry, transhumant architecture and peasant protests, the CAP and the bureaucratisation of the territory, ancestral irrigation systems and peasant forms of building well-being. He won the Sharjah Biennial Prize in 2015 with his project WAM (World Agricultural Museum) and represented Spain at the 13th Havana Biennial 2019. His work has been exhibited in institutions such as Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico, Victoria & Albert Museum in London, The Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Jameel Arts Centre in Dubai, Arnolfini Contemporary Arts in Bristol, Tranzit in Prague, Cappadox Festival in Uchisar-Turkey, MUSAC in León, CAB in Burgos, Matadero in Madrid, La Casa Encendida in Madrid, CA2M in Madrid, among others.

Identity and history of the community of Montes de Couso

The community of Couso is made up of 85 community members and seeks to convert the forest into a resource of multifunctional value and a source of resources in order to achieve a greater environmental value and a more respectful environment with native tree species. They work to advance in their self-sufficiency, the forest is a territory in which they grow raspberries, blueberries, currants, chestnuts, or the ‘shiitake’ variety of mushrooms. Montes de Couso has been recognised as an example of good management, appearing in the UN ICCA register and has received the IRGADE award for the promotion of the Galician language.

European Project: ‘Art Living Lab for Sustainability’.

Tierra Común' is part of the European project “Art Living Lab for Sustainability”, funded by the “Creative Europe” programme of the European Union and coordinated by Concomitentes together with the European partners “De Nieuwe Opdrachtgevers” and “La Société des Nouveaux Commanditaires”; and the University of Santiago de Compostela. 

The challenge of the project is to address three community management mechanisms: that of the mountain with ‘Tierra Común’ (Monte Vecinal de Couso, Galicia, Spain); clay with ‘Clay Commons’ (Boom, Flanders, Belgium); and water with ‘Water Commons’ (Regional Natural Park of the Haute Jura, France), through participatory processes in these territories, which will result in three works of art that respond to the needs of these communities and territories.

Concomitentes

Concomitentes is a cultural association, promoted by the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, the founding patron and strategic ally of the project, which promotes the production of works of art connected to their social environment. The project invites groups from civil society - the comitentes - to become the citizen promoters of these works that respond to a need that arises in the immediate context of these collectives.

Concomitentes is present in the territory through mediators who seek to ensure that everyone involved in the project is satisfied with the resulting work. This work takes the format that best suits the commission, measuring its value according to the use and relevance given to it by the citizens themselves.

Concomitentes is based on the methodology developed in 1990 by the artist François Hers, which over the last 25 years has had an enormous social and cultural impact, with more than 500 projects in various European countries, including France, Belgium, Germany and Italy. In Spain, Concomitentes is currently developing nine concomitances in Galicia, Madrid, Catalonia, the Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castilla y León and Extremadura.

CO-CREATORS OF THE RITUAL:

Natalia Balseiro, Xosé Antón Araúxo, Susana Sáiz Medinger, Iria Enríquez Blandón, Pilar Taladriz Cobas, Luis Alonso Bacigalupe, Paloma Amigo García, María López Gallego, Manuel Villot Pascual, Jesús Rodríguez Dieguez, María Lemos Cerqueira, Elena Gómez Dahlgren, Jose Manuel Lago, Basilio Calzado, María Dolores González Alonso, Mercedes Peón, Luis Enrique Correa Piñerro (Caruncho), Alba Herranz Pazos, Mar Herranz Pazos, Carmen Villanueva Rey, Paula Piñeiro González, Ruth Comesaña Granja, Montse Salgueiro Varela, Lucila Rial Prado, Sara González López, Patricia López Palmas, Xoaquín de Acosta Beiras, Pepe Reñones Rodríguez, Emilio Dios, Paco León, Suso Alonso Santos, Jose Alonso Santos, Jose Manuel Riobó Hermida, Marcos Castro González, Héctor Alfaro, Olivia Dawod Molinos, Adrián Alonso Docampo, Sheila Ribero Rodríguez, Francisco Javier Alonso, Jose Antonio Herbida Pérez, Fabio Duran Dios, Nicolas Abaldes, Jesés Abraldes Pérez, Juan Raúl Hernández Cuevas and Andrea Gómez Rodríguez.

All the photos are by Andreia Iglesias, whom we thank for her dedication and vision for bringing us these great little visual stories.