Les Medes / The Meadows

Social practice / participatory gathering / refolding

October 2019

Over six-days we made an attempted landing and temporary re-habitation of recently abandoned terraced crofts and manors in a special volcanic mountain region near Northern Catalonia. Inhabited probably continuously from the neolithic until the mid-twentieth century, the rich terraces have become an EU subsidy farming cattle ranch and hunting faux-wilderness.

Our performance culminated in a thirty-person gathering – and delicious barbecue, live music, and traditional games. Folding time, place, and people together (a)temporarily connecting people back to this place and re-marking the impossibility of severing our umbilical to the earth no matter how spaced out we become. Half the attendees were old folks who had been born and grown up in the ruined houses sited at the performance site. Their stories, smiles, tears and jokes were sad and heart warming. They kept commenting what a mess the place had become – having left as children and youth they remembered the tidy and worked landscape from 60 years gone by. I felt like I was witnessing the aftermath of enclosure and the process of de-indigenization. These people had been born of this very place. And now they had become Catalon and their children and grandchildren could easily continue abstracting becoming Spanish and, even, simply Europeans. After spending these days on the land, I felt an ecological assertion, despite the current regime of wild pigs, enclosure can be reversed and roots grown back into the land.