September 2024
NERU - New Ruralities
in partnership with University fo Minho, University of A Coruña and RIA Foundation
Barbanza, Galiza
course on soil science and artistic creation with international architecture and urban planing students

For two weeks, we took ten arqchitecture and urban planing students on an axpedition to various places in the bio-region of Barbanza, Galizia.

Along several research trips, they developed the ability to read the ecossistems' state of health and to critically analyse it acording to theories of ecological succession.

In the lab, they learned how to identify the main functional groups of microorgnisms playing key roles in the natural progression of soils, from the initial ones (along the coastline), to the more developed and complex ones (forests above certain altitudes).

Under our artistic direction, the students devised a public performance in which they prsented a narrative describing each of the places studied, in a progressive order of growing complexity, biodiversity and ecological development.

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Taking a critical stance, they included various analises to the impat, which different territorial and land managment attitudes have in the ecological state of local biomes and, therefore, on fundamental resources such as potable water, soil fertility and the quality of air and sea water.

They also aproached the pressing issue of vast eucalyptus and pine industrial plantations, scrutinizing in detail the various possbilities these production systemcs could deveop with the local native forests. There were even opportunities for technical recomendations to local authorities on the ways food production and the industrial green economies could be guided towards the regeneration of locally degraded soils and the maintenance and improvement of the quality of soils in the bio-region at large.

The performance included a soundpiece featuring a narrative voiced by students themselves, who also embodyed it through movements where imagens of microscopic analysis were shown, whist diagrams and technical annotations were being written on the ground.

All these gestures unfolded over a scaled countour map where material samples from each of the places studied were unvailed one by one.