Solar Narratives

This fact, which a priori represents a great advance towards decarbonisation, means for many of them, who have been fighting for years in eco-social activism, the university and the defence of rural areas, a hijacking of their environmentalist narratives by the big energy companies.

These people, who are beginning to organise themselves in the Platform in Defence of La Sobarriba, believe that to take on such an oversized extractivist project in this territory is to repeat a model of energy colonisation that has already occurred many times in the province of León with the Riaño reservoir, the underground and open-cast mines in the valleys of Laciana and El Bierzo, and the thermal power plant at La Robla.

Thus, the concomitance will activate a dialogic process with the neighbourhood and the ecosystem so that the effects on the habitats and the landscape that they all enjoy on their walks are as slight as possible, so that farmers do not feel expelled from the land they work and which is their livelihood, and that the impacts on hunting activity are minimal so that their homes are devalued as little as possible.

In order to establish this dialogue with the rest of society, they want to be understood in all the complexity of their thinking and place in the world. From the story of the dense, slow, seasonal and caring rural times that continue to endure in the face of the present time that imposes the tyranny of the immediate, the brief and the fast. Stopping to look and to look at ourselves. To stop, to perceive all that is already happening, and to heal from a network of protection and subjection.

And in this healing, they want to be told from the human and the non-human: from the people, the places, the buildings, the stories, the squares, the supplies or the liturgies. That which has come to be called territory and which is often homogenised, turning it into a landscape with the aim of losing its singularity.

Recreating and re-imagining the story of the celebration of living, with all its contradictions, in rural territories such as the Sobarriba. Uniting "doing" with "thinking", the "scientific" with the "magical", using the sensorial and emotional as the tool that serves us both for the observation of reality and for the description and redesign of these new narratives.