The town of Barruelo de Santull\u00e1n, located in the north of the Castilian-Leonese province of Palencia, is one of the 184 municipalities affected by the decarbonisation processes that the MITECO (Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge) has been carrying out over the last few years throughout Spain. This public policy is carried out with the aim of moving towards a green and low-carbon economy, in order to minimise the negative economic and social impacts caused by the process of abandoning polluting industries.<\/p>\n
During the heyday of coal mining, approximately 12,000 people lived in Barruelo de Santull\u00e1n, linked in one way or another to the mining industry. Now there are only 1,200 people living there, most of them retired from the mining industry and their families, who are trying to adapt to a territory with too many empty houses in a state of abandonment, despite having a significant housing problem. Some of them want to understand what material and immaterial legacy their ancestors left them, in order to leave those who succeed them something they can use to avoid repeating the dynamics and mistakes of the past. And they want to do so on the basis of the concepts of socio-environmental reparation, spatial and territorial justice, rethinking what is required to live in a territory where coal mining has been replaced by work in the biscuit industry in the nearby town of Aguilar de Campoo.<\/p>\n
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A group of people, who live in or descend from Barruelo de Santull\u00e1n, have been meeting in different ways and thinking about what they can do, and they have found a series of wounds that they want to repair. Wounds in which memory is very present. A memory that helps them to think about the future.<\/p>\n
Memory of the October Revolution of 1934, which split the people in two and which, nearly 90 years later, is still very much present in their conversations.
\nMemory of the mining families and their way of living and the way they used to build their houses, given the lack of space due to the orography of the locality.
\nMemory of women, whose stories have always been denied and which, despite the present historical moment, is still hidden under the epic stories of the miners and their work.
\nMemory of the places taken away by the speculation of the owners of the coal mining industry, who have turned the old industrial area into a closed and abandoned place, when it is communal land and streets where the neighbours used to live and walk, and which they want to recover at all costs.
\nMemory of the coal dump, very present in the local imaginary, which one day the authorities decided to eliminate without consulting them, just as they did with their struggles, their livelihoods and their illusions.<\/p>\n
This group, mostly made up of women, want to think with an artist about how, through art, they can create a creation of restorative justice that will serve as an impulse to take the reins of the future and continue repairing this territory.<\/p>","protected":false},"featured_media":254,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-385","proyecto","type-proyecto","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n