Tell us and sing to us
The group of commissioners met in Paradilla de la Sobarriba to begin to define what our artistic commission would be.
Helen Torres says, speaking of some of Vinciane Despret's ideas, in Chthulucene species, that we should “to think of love as a shared experience of becoming with, to pay attention, to generate interesting links, to practise responsibility with those who make us who we are”.”. And this is what has been happening and what happened in Paradilla de la Sobarriba when we gathered together the commissioners of the concomitance of ‘Narrativas Solares’ to begin to specify what our artistic commission will be.
We have been meeting in recent months in Valdelafuente, Villavente and Valdefresno. Talking about the urgencies that bring us together and that, throughout this time, have led us, on occasions, to think more about the rhythms set by institutions, large energy corporations and large cities. Times that we feel are increasingly in conflict with the natural times that we want to live in this rural area of Sobrarbe.
But, despite this, it has been in these meetings that we have visualised the sun and the landscape as a fundamental part of a creation that we are already beginning to imagine as pedagogical, It is a fuse that can ignite the thinking of those who experience it, generating changes in them..
Becoming with the construction site, the neighbours, the landscape, the liturgies, the non-human and the immaterial of the legacy we inhabit and that we are leaving to our heiresses. Amar the territory and everything that makes it up. Amar their times and temporalities shared with other species, and amalgamating past, present and future in a continuum.
“My mother was the teacher in Villavente in the 1960s and I lived there all my childhood” said a man who no longer lives in the area. “Of course, Mari Cruz Bartolomé, the best teacher in the world. She brought us all out of ignorance in the village. We named a street after her”, replied a resident of the village. Love and pedagogy united in a simple story that says a lot about what it has been and what it is to live in this rural area.
On this day we had invited Rodrigo Martínez, a musician from León who plays tradition from a contemporary and pedagogical point of view, to reinvent with us the way in which we were dealing with the themes that we have been pointing out as fundamental in our commission.
And we invited him to rework all these themes from the jocular tone of the rabeladas (pieces played and sung with rabel, usually improvised, which humorously recount the events and inhabitants of a place to tell its history).
We did it in this way because, among other things, in the face of the institutionalised discourse of “less stories and less chants”, we, as the commentator Carolina says, “need more stories”. And we believe that our stories have to be different and must start from the deepest and most real we feel. From liturgies that mean being together, listening to each other, telling and singing to each other, maybe dancing, walking and listening to the landscape. To turn the immaterial into matter by interacting between us and what we inhabit. And, as someone said that day, if everything has already been invented, let's recover what has always worked in the way it has worked. This is how this day came about; to create/recover/reinvent the way we meet and tell each other.
Rodrigo began by talking about how we invented the term tradition to talk about something that is ungraspable and that tradition is synonymous with evolution, that we insist on focusing on what is left behind, often idealising it, and that we forget to put our stone in this community construction that is living in the present in order to project ourselves into the future. Perhaps inhabiting this space consists, from now on, in recovering what we will be in the future.
Rodrigo sang his first song to the heavy. The boundaries, the places, the relations with the city, the mourned heritage, the animal neighbourhood of crows, cows and sheep, the conflict of the solar panels, the times marked by the solar rhythms or the tradition held by the inhabitants:
When I pass La Candamia I always say "Viva!
Because I like to sing coplas in La Sobarriba.
La Sobarriba has three beautiful municipalities
If you don't know their names, I will now quote them for you:
Villaturiel, Valdefresno and Las Vegas del Condado
If they didn't want to know, they wouldn't have asked me.
In Vegas there is fine trout and a tasty frejolada
The hermitage of Villafrías, with Villanueva rogada.
Villaturiel cereal, protected by three rivers
Mourning for Marialba, the lost old church
Valdefresno sheltered by the Porma, by Las Lomas
Don't step on our «Callejas», we're not here for jokes.
Land of rich countryside, they want to fill you with plaques
The clever people who took away our sheep and cows.
Any day now we will also be without the crows
Frightened by the noise of Calleja's paratu.
A sundial to be placed in the middle of the plateau
And instead of counting hours, they are going to count pesetas.
Sobarriba, a noble land of aluches and banners.
There are a million reasons to live in your villages.
That's why I shout loudly, you're not going to throw me out of here.
Repeat loudly with me: fuck them!!!
His next rant was light-hearted, talking about the institutions that are so distant from this territory and yet so intrusive with everything to do with life here and with the people who live there. common, of public or well-known personalities who live in the region and the importance of the aluches in La Sobarriba:
The aid to the provincial council has arrived
and the lorry did not pass through La Sobarriba.
Because it is already daylight because it is already visible,
because I bring eggs from Villaturiel.
Bitches coming from the Board,
add up to zero plus zero and then aim.
Because it is already daylight because it is already visible,
because I planted a pine tree in Valdefresno.
While I was at the hermitage I pissed_the ewer
and then a civil guard was appointed.
An old woman died laughing,
he wanted to fine all of Arcahuejá.
The Bishop of Astorga entered the choir,
was given a whole one and left with it.
Because it's not Sunday and he won't say Mass,
helped the mistress to get up.
If you are absent from the bed,
Santibáñez boasts of the great Potencias.
Because it fits big, how spectacular.
The wagon's rod seems to carry...
Calleja entered the ring for the fight,
in the first morning I saw the trout.
To his mother he says: how obedient I am,
every time you call me I fly away.
Because it has a swimming pool, a garden and a hangar
and the highest muria of too Golpejar.
To finish, Rodrigo played the diatonic accordion, to sing to us about the extractivism that has always been very present in these territories; to tell us about the mines, the swamps, the dumps and the near certainty that this dryland area is going to be a sacrifice zone:
Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
rode the Vespino
they put the gps on
and they paved the way
guided by that spawn
came to León
and some very large pots and pans
caught their attention
they are not giants
don't get hot
what are windmills
do not vent your violence
what mills and millstones
if they grind nothing
are yet another requirement
to this worn-out land
they put us in the marshes
they plundered our entrails
and now they're sticking us with ghouls
to give light to the whole of Spain
let's get out amigo sancho
let's flee in disguise
that if we are careless
they will also give us...a landfill site
Our aim with this day was to draw conclusions about what we were devising. We drew many, but perhaps the most important thing is that we gave air to our thoughts and our words; to our relationships; and we laughed at ourselves, at many of our seriousnesses, and we put those thoughts and words to work. Goliaths o giants in a place from which to look at them without so much gravity.
