Exercise in Being Here, Day 5: looking at mosses, making a lichen carpet for a scoby

 

 

 

 

 

When I was here last summer (read more about that here) I was impressed by the mosses and lichens everywhere in the landscape. Some of my favourite things in O Castro Art Village are the stone stairs overgrown with mosses in front of several houses, a sign that hardly any feet have touched those steps for a long time. 

Dead branches with lichen loosely attached to them are scattered everywhere and if you walk through the forest you see trees covered in it. The little apple tree that carried many apples in summer now looks eerier than ever. 

I collected large amounts of the lichen and made a first attempt to sew it together, without a specific aim other than to create a large piece and see from there. For now it is only a small carpet and when I placed a dried scoby on top of it I realised they are both the result of a symbiotic partnership: bacteria and yeast for the scoby, fungi and algae for the lichen.

Exercises in Being Here, Day 4: listening

 It is hard to take your eyes off the view, especially in the morning when the clouds form a blanket over the valley but also in the afternoon, when the sun moves through the clouds and beams of light reach all the way down to the river. In the evening the clouds are often still there but at night it is clear and there are many stars. I like to sit on the little wall in front of the kitchen, on the old part where the stones have been stacked meticulously, decades—maybe centuries—ago, where small plants grow on top and little ferns at the bottom. What happens when you listen to instead of look at the landscape? It sounds easy and in a way it is, but how do you really listen? The best way to figure that out is to do it and see what happens. 

I sit down and close my eyes. It is so silent here, which means that every sound breaks the silence and asks for attention. The wind is there most of the time, until it lies down and you forget about it until it comes back. A dog barks, another dog starts barking, somebody is hammering, a power tool, silence again, which of course is never really silence. There is the blood running through your veins and you hear it when your ears turn inwards. When a car approaches it is almost impossible not to open my eyes, because the sound of cars is rare here. Church bells, the same tune always, I already hear the notes in my memory before they sound. Faraway voices, another dog. Every time I hear something my brain names it, how do you listen without your brain processing what it hears? I try a few times during the day, but to actively “just” hear the sounds without thinking what makes the sound is hard. It is not so when listening to music, or at least most of the time it isn’t, at least when it is instrumental music.

In the evening the soundscape is different. There are no cars, no human voices, there are owls and they are loud. Every time I hear one I think “owl” and when they make an owl sound I am not familiar with, I think “what kind of owl?” There is something making a high pitched sound and for a while I just hear it without thinking, coming from different corners but then again:”Is it a mouse, mice, another rodent?”

Maybe it will be different when I am here longer and the sounds aren’t as new as they are now, probably I have to do some listening for a longer stretch of time. I want to read Pauline Oliveros who created the Deep Listening practice and Raymond Murray Schafer who coined the term soundscape and John Cage who taught that music is everywhere in the ordinary moments of life, but not today. Today I just listen. 

Exercises in Being Here, Day 3: watching the clouds, waiting for the river

 

 

 
We were waiting for the river, the boat and I. I knew it was there and I suspected the boat did as well. At 9, from somewhere in the clouds, church bells rang. In a dream, I would have stepped in the boat and rowed out on the white weightless blanket, but this wasn't a dream, even when it felt like one. So we just waited, the boat and I, until first the church appeared, then the village on the other side and much later a little bit of blue surrounded by trees, slowly growing into a moving mirror of the world above.

Exercises in Being Here, Day 2: reading the walls

 

Exercises in Being Here, Day 1: eating snails

I left in a 2 piece walking suit, aka business suit. I bought it for 2 euro's and will walk in it and transform it, or it might transform me. It is suit number 9, another Soft Armour (and if you're curious about the other suits just click on the links in the right upper corner). C., my faithful walking trolley, was packed with art materials and handy stuff for a journey that would undoubtedly bring many surprises. I prefer to walk but I already walked to Galicia last year, so this time I took a slow train which wasn't easy because C. had to go through security scanners and be disassembled before entering the train. I hadn't counted on the scanner and lost my beautiful hunters knife. But there are always things you lose on a journey, and there are the things you gain in return. 

Lleida, Zaragoza, Pamplona, Victoria-Gasteiz, Burgos, Leon, Ponferrada, Monforte de Lemos. With more than an hour delay, I arrived around 21.30 in the capital of the Ribeira Sacra. 

After putting C. in a room without a view next to the railway station, I ordered a beer in the nearest bar. I had forgotten that a drink here comes with a tapa, a little snack, and you can choose from more than 10 different ones. I guess it was like that in Barcelona once, but this traditional form of hospitality has been long lost in the city that is dominated by tourists. I chose the snails and they brought back memories of a project I once did in Sweden, where snails were my collaborators and performed their life (and amazing love-making) in a little gallery in the middle of nature. I wore a black suit there and sometimes some snails would crawl up my trousers because they like dark spaces. Those snails were the descendants of French snails that were brought to Sweden in the 12th century by monks, to be eaten on their fasting days -they weren't considered meat- and after the monks left, the snails stayed and flourished. 

There was a newspaper on my table with an article about shepherding in Galicia. I read: "Para mí es como magia. Me voy al monte, con mis perros y mis libros, y rejuvenezco. Hasta que alguna oveja me hace una faena. (Risas)." In English: "It is like magic to me. I go to the mountain, with my dogs and my books, and rejuvenate. Until one of the sheep requires some work. (Laughs)" 

Snails and shepherds, a good way to end the day. Tomorrow I will walk, I can't wait to be with the river and the mountains again, with rocks and mosses and owls in the night, with fog and local stories, to be slow like a snail again.

Exercises in being here

After a first project in Austria where the Bureau collaborated with a number of artists and a small army of scobys (symbiotic cultures of bacteria and yeast) during Schmiede in Hallein, BurSE will embark upon a new journey to research and present slow ways of being in Galicia (Spain) at O Castro Art Village. The title of the project is: Exercises in Being Here and daily “Exercises in Being Here” will be posted on this blog, starting November 26 when Monique is travelling on a slow train from Barcelona to Monforte de Lemos to walk to O Castro. You can read about her first encounter with this abandoned village that is being turned into a place for art and wellbeing here

Coming soon .....