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Este proyecto se compone de una obra de videocreación y acciones pedagógicas y culturales en el entorno rural de la Sierra de Gredos. Bajo la interpretación de la naturaleza como una construcción material cultural, que evoluciona con el tiempo y con los cambios socioeconómicos de la sociedad que la habita y transforma en función de sus necesidades; se nos propone un viaje a la experiencia de la “trasterminancia” en la Sierra de Gredos. Guiados por los vestigios visuales y sonoros (humanos, naturales y materiales), seguiremos los rastros del paisaje cultural del pastoreo de cabras como medio de supervivencia, practicado desde hace cientos de años en este lugar, y actualmente extinguido hace tan sólo una década gracias a nuestra “moderna sociedad del progreso”.

Casares

Organised as part of the project The School For Tourists by artist Emma Smith

Wednesday 17 October

4.30-7pm

Meeting Point: Centro d’Artisania, Calle Villa

The aim of the School for Tourists is to think through and pilot possibilities for a new form of tourism: one that is reciprocal, contributive and sustainable.

Hedge School is an event created by The School for Tourists to think through and practically test out ideas for a new model of tourism that is of benefit to the residents of Casares.

The Hedge School will ask the following questions:

- What could be gained by inverting the tourist expectation of being serviced by considering the notion that the tourist could be of resource to an area?

- How might the potential of the vast range of skills, interests and knowledge of visitors and residents that come into proximity through tourism be connected and contributed to a location?

- How can the experience / education / facilities available to the tourist also be of use and benefit to local residents?

These questions will be posed and thought out through a series of practical activities that will act as a platform for discussion.

The Hedge School is a mobile programme and will be hosted in a number of locations around Casares. The activities included in this event are as follows:

Summary of activities:

Introduction: artist talk

Skills workshop: learning local skills

Story telling street walk: mobile theatrical street performances

Wayfaring: getting lost together

Read-In: meeting with strangers and sharing language

Cooking Lesson: sharing knowledge of food

Knowledge Exchange: an opportunity for tourists to give back.

Details of Activities:

Artist Talk

An introductory talk by Artist Emma Smith on the problems of tourism, the need for new models and an outline of the days event.

Skills Workshop

A workshop to learn local skills connected to the land. This workshop tests out a format by which local residents can share and pass on skills that connect them to Casares while offering tourists a point of entry to engage physically with the knowledge of the area. In learning these skills together the model offers the potential for tourism to support local learning. During this session the group will be invited to think through other skills that might feed into a future model of this programme.

Language of the Land

A mobile story telling walk of the streets of Casares. Viewing Casares as an active living space rather than historic monument this walk includes stories of the streets recounted in Spanish and enacted by local actors. This session aims to create a format through which residents can recall and share their local histories and tourists can listen to and learn the phrases and expressions of these tales while understanding their content through the improvised enactments. While walking participants will also be invited to consider how we might re-map Casares by the verbs and actions that one does here as apposed to the nouns and names that frieze it in time.

Wayfaring

An opportunity to get lost in Casares. Inviting a tourist participant to volunteer to lead the group in any direction they choose, this session will focus on what can be learnt by walking together, and the importance of being lost as a point to come together.

Read-In

Based on the method created by Annette Kraus in Holland, the group will go from house to house asking if someone will host us for our next session: a collective reading. The aim of this session is to test a format by which strangers can come together instantaneously without prior arrangment, utilizing this moment of the coming together of tourists and residents as a space to share language and learn from one another. Once the group has been invited into someone’s house or terrace the group will read together Act 2, Scene 2 of Brian Friel’s play Translations, working together to translate the work from English to Spanish and adapting it to the location of Casares.

Cooking Lesson

This session offers the opportunity to learn about local food and recipes from a resident of Casares. Like the skill sharing workshop the format offers the opportunity for local residents to share and pass on skills while tourists engage physically with the knowledge of Casares, encouraging an understanding of the connection between food and place.

Knowledge Exchange

This session offers the opportunity for the tourist to give back. Welcomed into a holiday home this session will offer a reciprocal cooking lesson offered by the artist as a visitor to Casares.

The day will close with a discussion on how ideas from the event may be taken forward.

Hedge School Design Poster Spanish

• What is the start of your project?

My project is called the ‘School for Tourists’. The School for Tourists was initiated during a one year residency at Grizedale Arts in the Lake Distict, UK, in 2011. Held at the Coniston Institute, a historic building created by John Ruskin in the 19th Century, for education, the arts and social cohesion, the School for Tourists examined existing tourism, as well as the historical and sociological impact of the tourist. Through a week long course that brought together local residents, workers, council members, conservationists, service industry professionals and tourists the project aimed to consider and propose new models of relationship that might offer more to host and guest, to pilot and test new forms of tourism that are reciprocal and contributive.

The School for Tourists II in Casares follows on as a development of this project. Having traced the history of tourism from the Grand Tour, to the package holiday, the modernist quest for authenticity to the post-modern quest for the in-authentic the School for Tourists II asks how we might shape a tourist model that begins in the muddy broken middle ground of relationship. What are the tactics for exchange and human relation that can result in benefit beyond the financial myth of tourist development?

Estamos en uno de los límites del pueblo de Almonaster La Real. En una porción de tierra que pertenece a los Comunes de este pueblo. En ella siguen en pie muretes de piedra, pequeñas habitaciones, cubículos, guaridas. Sobre la mejor posicionada hemos trazado una estructura que explora lo que esta tierra es y lo que podría ser…

La tierra pertenece a los Comunes. Es una tierra antigua. Romana. Almohade… Y con las piedras de todas esas épocas pudieron ellos levantar estas cabañas. Allí vivían sus animales. Ellos también son los Comunes. Al trabajo de ordenar esas piedras le correspondía un derecho, el de poseer los muros pero no la tierra sobre la que se levantaban. Los muros de esta cabaña son de Manuel Barrero. Este es el documento de donación de esos muros al Común.

En el centro Manuel Barrero con algunos de nosotros. Le ha gustado mucho esto de los Comunes y el Pequeño Museo, así que haya donado con gusto los muros de su majada. La cuestión de la propiedad de los muros de esta comunidad era ya de por sí particular, porque han ido pasando de mano en mano por casi todos los vecinos.

Estos comunes tienen un alcalde, Manuel Angel, a quien le interesa el proyecto y viene a vernos. En ocasiones el que haya una figura que toma decisiones impide que esos que se dicen Comunes se organicen. Habría que pensar cómo cambiar esto…

El lugar está arropado por unas bóvedas encadenadas. Tejas enormes. Formas animales. Un retablo de madera y barro. Los animales ya no se cobijan allí, pero sus lomos y testuces pasajeras han pasado a tomar forma en la arquitectura.

Decimos que este es el Pequeño Museo Comunal. Es un espacio que piensa esta idea de lo Comunal, y lo trata de pensar desde las formas mismas que lo configuran. Desde el cómo y el quien ha levantado esas formas y desde el proceso de esa estructura como forma. Es un lugar de reunión. Donde comenzar una colección. Donde componer una historia que anda desperdigada, que aun no está escrita. Los documentos e imágenes de esta tierra y de tantas otras que cuentan cómo son capaces de organizarse las fuerzas comunes…

Ricardo García told us about his journeys throw the mountains. He will join the classes in October, where he will explain the group about how takes care of his plants.