Common Land

In Galicia there are currently 2,800 forest communities that manage 670,000 hectares of land, a third of all forest land and almost ¼ of the Galician territory. This is a type of private and collective property that belongs to a community of neighbours who exercise usufructuary sovereignty over the forest territory they inhabit, according to researcher Lara Barros.

The community of Montes de O Couso is located in the municipality of Gondomar (Pontevedra, Galicia), and has been in operation, with the current team of community members, since 1984. It is currently made up of eighty-four people who work to guarantee the multifunctionality and productivity of its three hundred and thirty hectares of communal woodland in order to form a self-sufficient community in terms of energy, food, culture, leisure and health prevention.

These eighty-four people make up the group of commissioners who initiate this process of mediation, with the aim of imagining together desires and needs for this communal mount. The challenge is to make a contemporary reading, from the point of view of art, through a participatory investigation of the community's desires. This mediation process will be accompanied by the cultural mediator Natalia Balseiro.

The communal people already form a community, which is inserted in a unique and situated ecosystem and which, during the participatory research, we will have to get to know from a contemporary perspective. In the coming months, once their wishes have been identified, different artists will be invited to propose solutions based on nature in order to finally commission a work of art that will be produced in a place in the communal mountains of Couso.

The idea is to help the community to achieve its objectives, bringing the Montes do Couso closer to society as a whole, to the administration and to the neighbours, with a better understanding of this ancestral legal formula of managing the land in a joint and self-managed way. A formula that has made it possible over the years to maintain the rights of the neighbours over the land and the forests protected, productive and in use. A system of collective government based on the assembly of community members.

The work will be commissioned at the end of 2023 for production during 2024.