Gaia's voice is conjured in [re]. 

The «re» of [Re]conocer draws attention to the recursivity of the mountain, in a joint becoming that could make us dance with the irruption of Gaia. 

[Re]getting to know the bush is a conceptual tool constructed by the Comitentes de Peñamayor. With it, we say that we want to return to the knowledge of the forest, to the memory of its community uses and to inhabiting as an archive of heritage: an archive that allows us to explore the continuity between forms of struggle and forms of life. We are interested in the ambivalent and ambiguous interweaving that takes place there, as a place from which to think about the potential of participatory art to contribute to forms of struggle that «rekindle the embers of the living» (Morizot 2020). 

That is why we also put the «re» in brackets. It is not so much a great discovery that we are pursuing as an awareness of what surrounds us. It is not just a matter of recovering the past as it is. was (to know), nor to limit oneself to consecrating the existence of what has already been is (recognise). We also want to learn to to know differently, to go beyond the commonplace to apprehend and weave with the commonplace. Both «knowing» and «recognising» are key elements in our project; but we are also moved by the possibility of engaging with more subtle, more «lateral» agencies (Berlant 2020: 177-230), which do not speak the language of the binary, but add density. We want to ally ourselves, for example, with the persistence of La Peña, with its insistence, with its indomitable agency, with what makes it something that exceeds all kinds of subjection. For it is there that the language of an unprecedented resistance emerges, that of the voice of «Gaia» (Latour 2017).

Like all commons, La Peña belongs to everyone and no one at the same time. This constitutive emptiness, consigned in this hopeful particle [re], pushes us: it makes us return to the knowledge of the past and (re)orients us in this process of initial exploration. The concept of «[re]knowing the mountain» makes audible, then, that same prophetic threshold, beyond the linear history of what was Peñamayor and of what is today. It opens up a space to be invented; an unprecedented dance, between what we inherited and what is yet to be conjured. We celebrate the arrival of this gift, this gift, as a form of practical utopia (Esteban Muñoz 2007), the same one that we activate with the action of concomitance.

The project takes shape with the collaboration between the neighbourhood platform Salvemos Peñamayor and the cultural space La Benéfica de Piloña, thus outlining the contours of a general question: can contemporary art make us more rootedWhat might this mean, how might it transform the way we fight against extractivism? [Re]knowing the bush poses the challenge of mobilising art from a politics of knowledge that recomposes links to care, to return to the knowledge of the bush and its communal uses, as a way of interrupting the extractivist cosmology. Our question is that restlessness, which we are learning to conjure collectively. 

But to get there we first need to reposition ourselves. We know we are vulnerable: heirs to a geohistory of dispossession and extractivism that runs through us, a geohistory that alienated us and disassociated us from a politics of the mountain that we are barely able to recognise any more if not from the vantage point of the city. Perhaps that is why we are so concerned about the threats to Peñamayor, such as mining prospecting. We are well aware, from our colleagues in the Global South, of the trickery of this silent war, of its way of imprisoning us without even declaring war itself (Cadena 2019: 39-45). We owe it to Salvemos Peñamayor to have been disturbed by this, and to have demonstrated, before the eyes of all, to what extent this undeclared war is also taking place in the interior of the West, in the heart of Asturian nature.

We also know, and this pushes us, that we want to go beyond the exhausting trench struggle, that we want to invent other forms of resistance with which to regenerate ourselves, thought of as a network of «cultural rearguards» (Moure Rosende & Escariz Pérez 2024) capable of making the struggle sustainable in the long term. We are thus challenged to think about the relationship between politics and art; the experimentation of the sensitive as a laboratory, as a privileged place for the reinvention of the way of life. This concomitance invites us, therefore, to [Re]getting to know the bush, It encourages us to return to it and to think about how we can inhabit it in a different way. It also encourages us, why not, to ambush ourselves: to recognise the forest we already are; to [re]know the relationship between knowledge and the territory we inhabit, and to rediscover it as a place of loving openness, of resistance.

Referencies/References

Berlant, Laurent (2020). Cruel optimism. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. 

Cadena, Marisol de la. (2019). «Uncommoning Nature: Stories from the Anthropo-Not-Seen». In  Anthropos and the Material, (eds.) Christian Krohn-Hansen & Knut G. Nustad (eds.). Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 35-58.

Esteban Muñoz, José Esteban (2020). Queer Utopia. The then and there of anti-normative futurity.. Buenos Aires: Caja Negra. 

Latour, Bruno (2017), Face to face with the planet: a new look at climate change away from apocalyptic positions. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI.

Morizot, Baptiste (2020). Raviver les braises du vivant: un front commun. Marseille: Éditions Wildproject. 

Moure Rosende, Ana, and Ana Escariz Pérez, «Estamos empeñadas en contarvos que isto é extraordinario», Diary of Os contos do leite, Concomitants. Accessible at https://concomitentes.org/estamos-empenadas-en-que-isto-e-extraordinario/[Consulted, 18 April 2025].