Postcards from Extremadura
01.
From: National 2 (N2), Monegros desert, on a July Tuesday at four pm
To: An oilless future
We cut a wedge between a Huesca and Zaragoza, to avoid the toll highway but also to be closer to the dry landscape. We notice a second deserted gas station, only it's metal skeleton is left. The sign overlooking the motorway has died, eaten by the sun. On the other side of the road, an abandoned pig farm, covered in graffiti. On the gable, someone has painted a lightblue cloud and in capitals, the word 'NUBE' (cloud).
02.
From: Hunting fields, Tuesday and Wednesday
To: Antifa scenographies
In Aragon, yesterday. Two large stuffed deer heads are placed on the plain backwall of the spacious bar. Traces from party decoration hang from their majestic horns. A painting of a village scene placed in the middle, slightly off-center. The day after, we have crossed into the west-side of the peninsula. At our first stop an intensified hunting scene: we find ourselves at a shooting range that seems to double as a fascist head quarters. Spanish flags and eagle semiotics on every surface, militaria and edible dead animal legs battle for attention with the sounds of guns. In the news, ongoing reports of white supremacist terrorism, convoked via the Telegram chat "deport them now" calling to "hunt migrants" in Torre Pacheco.
03.
From: Pit-free fruits grown in a non-urban area, Thursday morning
To: Our headquarters in very urban areas
We have our coffees in the cool morning shade in front of the albergue, an almost finished newly built bordering the back of the small village school. On our left, a horse is parked in the street. A dog runs by, barking at a passing cyclist. In front of us, across the road, an olive orchard. We hear sheep bleat in the distance. Jose explained us that he avoids the word 'rural' for places like Valverde, preferring to use 'non-urban area' instead. A red Mercedes drives by, and stops. A stocky man with an impressive grey moustache gets out and asks if we want to buy potatoes, tomatoes, or melons. J engages in conversation, as they say 'for the sake of it'. The man opens the trunk of his car, it is filled with melons. He chooses one, taps it performatively, his round voice booming in the silent street. A young person, probably his son, gets a scale from the driving seat Seven kilos is seven euros his dad says says. J is taken aback. That's a lot of money they say. But these melons are pit-free, the man argues. This information makes J almost break off the deal, but finally we decide to buy the genetically manipulated fruit at the proposed price. It is still waiting for us, unopened, at the kitchen counter. We decided to collectivize it the next day for breakfast, but somehow never managed. J takes the melon home to Barcelona.
04.
From: Reading the end of the worlds, at the end of this week
To: Heated-up Post-Europe
We decide to take our books to Valverde de Burguillos’ swimming pool; it is empty besides a small group of kids who are learning to swim. O joins us. Her role these days is to translate between Spanish and English for two of us who do not speak the language. It has not been easy to find the space for her to do that work, nor for us to actually ask her for it. Especially at the dinner table last night it felt awkward. This morning, she says: I found we did not manage to explain properly, yesterday, your project. Does she mean to say we did not explain properly, or did she feel her translation failed? She adds: "Normally I know how to explain, but not this time. It is so complex". O turns to Gramsci while we read This system is killing us. Post-Europe. Make Rojava Green Again. Scorched earth. The heat-wave has subsided and the temperature is now surprisingly pleasant (this last one could be a book title too!). A breeze takes off the last lingering heat, it is almost too fresh in the shade. How on earth are we going to merge the leftist tradition of thought on hegemony with elastic methods for surprise solidarities, across heated-up contexts without getting burned in translation?
05.
From: Spectacle of convergence
To: Coalitions of lights
While getting closer to Sevilla, a striking light pierces the window of the plane. Surrounded by multiple circular layers of rectangular shapes, neatly organised, all pointed toward the center, producing a second sun in the middle of the ground. On the way from Zafra to Valverde, J mentions that this spectacle is a solar power tower, a pilot project from 14 years ago to generate energy from the convergence of light. Rectangular mirrors all point towards one central spot that coagulates and transforms it, a reverse panopticon. Other projects to generate energy were more successful, the future of this one remains unclear. Later, we drift down the streets of Valverde just before sunset. Strangely, all streetlights are already on, too early to have any impact while the golden sunlight is hitting right back, slowly disappearing. The rays of light and their trajectory are speaking to us about how dreamy optimisation and the lack of basic adjustements do indeed cohabit in this world of ours. We take note of that to let go of certain rigid binarisms in our own technopolitical and ecosocial positionalities. The coalition of lights carries both problems and potentials in one go.
06.
From: The South of the North
To: Some centers of power
These days Uexküll, Berger, Da Silva, BQF, Bookchin, and Berlant float around us in conversations over a table full of other names such as Phillips, Daggett, Dunlap, Squarzoni, Cortiñas or Hui.
When preparing for our second Drop-in session months ago in much more Northern coordinates, we said we would do it as a read-write situation. Little did we know about how the South would affect us not only meteorologically, but also in the form of collective understanding of what togetherness means. It starts with participants arriving late to the workshop with a baking dish which doubles as a tray, with two flasks of freshly made coffee, milk, sugar and enough cups for everyone. We adapt the method on the go, as participants really want to let go of individual exercising and express a need to formulate complexities together. The second half of the session hesistantly but quicly grows animated when we start to cross our formulations, discussing and exchanging. When lunch arrives, some of us continue, others join again later as we discuss each others’ proposals under a tree. In the grass, a mouse & some ants cross our bodies. We look at each other’s notebooks, peaking at the formulas as if cheating at an exam and sharing with each other attemps at calculating contested efficiency for digestion through time perception, weakening hegemony, calima dust, collective energy banking, hopelessness chains and social energy, vibration of forms across territories, and inventing new operators like nothing-ing, or but-ing.
07.
From: The twin fountain and its twin
To: Models of/for life
We’ve been told that digital twins are real-world representations updated often to simulate and/or analyze real-world phenomena, objects and relationalities. But what about the non-digital twins, or their reversal thereof? Unreal models of an unbelieveable world? Outdated volumes devoid of analytical projections? Figures held together and hostage by projections of and onto each other?
A bouquet of equin figures do time at the base of a turned-off fountain, erected next to an actual horse.
Or the other way around: a commodified, tied up lookalike has its tail sharply cut, a real-ish entity living next to its archetype, its cultural projection.
Or the other way around: living next to, finding yourself in the shadow of theavy imagery of what should be, or what your life could stand for.
Not sure what is being modelled anymore. Or what is the degree of damages accumulated in each of them… or how they need each other or not to continue their respective very diverse but both (non)representational tasks of unimaginative worldmaking.
08.
From: An observatory of power/light
To: Delicate tracings of pressing matters
A screening at the local teleclub about the current state of teleclubs. A piece of fabric the size of a solar panel, colored with fragrant natural dye made with plants in collected in the perimeter of a solar plant, then exposed to the sun. A large publication gathers photographs of animals finding shade under, sitting on, looking at the solar panels. A Business Poem, read out at different thresholds, gates, perimeters, boundaries that hinge from one area into another. An electronically amplified voice, performing riffs on bureaucratic language in the ruins of an energy-flower mill, the light quickly fading. An ingenious device, rhythmically marking time of perpetually being filled and emptied of water. The making of a modest battery, handmade, using concrete, sheets of woven metal, wire and a plastic crate overlayed with the voice over of energetic announcements of yet another innovative project for green-clean-sovereign futures. A non-urban derive, accompanied by a soundscape-datascape of measuring soil’s moisture, temperature, fertility. The artistic practices we encounter these days are each in their own way stripped of hyperboles, close to the ground, without promises of any kind. We discover them together with the artists, some villagers, the mayor, and passers-by. V is hugged by one of the teleclub owners as if he was family, someone who lives in Valverde asks about the abstractness of a video about concrete, people gather at the closing concert in the local pool bar. On the last day, driving past photovoltaic vastness, J asks F, ‘how do you deal with all this?’. Looking back at the days spent together, the time committed to each other, to these questions, to this territory, to tracing and celebrating together the life force resisting ‘all this’, still holds us.
09.
From: Blackouts on our first evening, and our last morning in Extremadura
To: A flick of the switch
On our first evening, J takes us to a church at the limit of the village, overlooking the rolling hills. One window high up in the west wall cathches the last light, a madonna hides in a faintly glittering alcove. In front of the altar, a device is plugged into a socket. A battery of electric candles is mounted on a fake wooden pedestal, protected by a perspex box, none of them lighted. A sign reads: ‘Ofrenda, 20 cts Euro. NO BILETES’. We drop a coin of 20 cents in the slot. Nothing happens.
A few minutes later, two people enter the church, open an oak door on the right side of the altar and after some rummaging, he turns the power on. The church is now lit brightly, and also the electric candles start flickering all at once, then the first top row remains lit, more than half of them are broken. We decide to offer one euro. All lights flicker for a short moment, now the first row and half of the second are on.
On our last morning, we drive up to the Nuñez De Balboa solar panel plantation, keeping the windows of the car closed to keep out the ‘calima’ or desert dust. We discuss the recent nation-wide blackout, and it seems confirmed that it started here, in Extremadura; in Nuéz de Balboa (note the colonial naming and the semiotic-material folds it keeps providing). V wonders excitedly if it could have been sabotage, but J is sure that it was a coincidence. Nothing is a coincidence though. Would management mediocrity count as counter-insurgence? Of course, we all feel wanting to the idea to jump the fence, to cut the wires. But today we stay on the wrong side of the fence and enjoy the birds shit on the panels, the crows flirt their peers with glossy just-stolen jewels, the dust limit their yield, the sheep rub against the switch and turn whole rows off in one go.