Everything that fits in a cheese

¿What if we were to make a cheese with milk that carries the memory of the Quintas Estate? We activate the work of the Futurefarmers

In September, the Futurefarmers visited A Ulloa to carry out the production of the play.

The group of commissioners had decided that they wanted to commission a work of art with an open theme and format that would dialogue with the threat of the macro-cellulose that Altri intends to install in A Ulloa. The work had to enunciate a desirable future while being aware of the past, and it had to leave a material trace in the territory.

With the evolution of the fight against Altri and with the victories obtained - it is always important to celebrate them, even if they are small, as our colleague says Alfredo-What we thought would be a work that would support the fight against macrocellulose, seeking external visibility, ended up becoming a work that looked towards the territory itself and sought to continue telling the stories of milk, of the naturoculture of A Ulloa that we want to protect, while we continue to extend the network of care, the wheel of care, among the clients and all those people who are gradually joining in and will continue to do so.

With all this in mind, the Futurefarmers thought about the digestive process of cows, one of the few beings capable of digesting cellulose. If the Finca de Quintas had long ago been a place where cows grazed... what would happen if we made a cheese from milk that carried with it the memory of that place? So the idea of making cheese was born. How to make the process collective and generate care around it? Thus the idea of the wheel was born.

The Quintas farm is closed, but microorganisms and soils do not understand borders or fences. We decided to take a group of cows from A Vacariza to graze on a farm that is very close to Quintas (thank you María Soledad José Manuel!). We spent some time with them, a long, ruminating time, while they absorbed nutrients from the same serpentine soil where they want to install the macrocellulose.

Monica's mother, Maria, helped us choose a tame cow to milk the next day: Zebra.

Early the next morning, our cow had already digested all the grazing. It was time to milk her.

In the meantime, the comitentes and the Futurefarmers, dressed in their caretaker costumes, rolled the wheel built by the artists from the Finca de Quintas, crossing over the motorway, to one of Monica's family's farms. There, among many hands and in the company of the cows, who approached us curiously, we made our first cheese: a cheese that would carry with it all the ferment and the memory of that serpentine rock pasture, of the bugs that lived there, of the cow that had grazed and digested it, of the hands that extracted the milk and gave it shape...

While the casein micelles in the milk were joining each other, the milk carers joined together using buttons we had made days before in a milk button workshop.

Once we had the cheese curdled, we rolled it between our hands to shape it. After a lot of turning, we put it in the wheel's time capsule and we started to roll uphill, towards Zeltia's house, the customer who would take care of the wheel and the cheese until the next time it was moved. Thus, the wheel and the cheese will go from house to house, from caretaker to caretaker, as is done in Palas with the Virgin of Perpetual Help.

The next trip that the wheel and the cheese made was this week, in December. The idea is that, in each place the wheel and the cheese pass through, something is activated, a naturocultural element of that place that we want to point out.

On this occasion, we took the wheel from Ponte Campaña, where Zeltia lives, to Curbián, where Lu lives. Several of the people who make up a new choir that was born in A Ulloa and directed by Catuxa Salom joined in the ride. When we arrived, the choir sang and we did a cheese tasting among all the participants. It was very good. Both the cheese and the wheel will stay at Lu's house until the next trip, which will probably be the one we will make on the day of the inauguration.

More news soon!