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Four female artists address four environmental challenges from Concomitentes.
Concomitentes is a non-profit entity in Spain that promotes the creation of artworks and mediates between the civil society that commissions them and the artists who produce them. The entity invites groups from civil society to become the citizen-commissioners, or “comitentes”, of a work of art.
The concerns of these communities are increasingly related to socio-environmental challenges. Among them is the need to preserve the legacy of a community or to face the threat of the energy transition in rural areas. This year, the answer to four environmental challenges through the proposal of four contemporary female artists will be inaugurated: Carme Nogueira, Laia Estruch, María Auxiliadora Gálvez and Asunción Molinos Gordo thus become the four artists who, through their work, address the conflicts of four different communities located in Betanzos (A Coruña), Llanos (Cantabria), La Sobarriba (León) and the Couso Mountains (Pontevedra).
On May 25, the multidisciplinary researcher and artist Carme Nogueira will present her intervention in the enigmatic Parque do Pasatempo. The result of six years of work on Legacy Care project with the neighbours of Betanzos (Galicia), the artistic proposal—composed of seven modular pieces made of recycled cement—will be installed in an area protected as heritage resource, emulating an old canal. The artwork also includes a new landscaping proposal of a degraded area of the park.
Further east, in Cantabria, the Aguas Vivas project has delved into the relationship of the town of Llanos with its water resources. The artist Laia Estruch will inaugurate on July 13 an artistic proposal that aims to restore and give “a new voice” to the town’s three historical fountains with a sculptural and sound work linked to the vitality of water. An exercise in which air and water are connected, where the residents of the town will be brought together through a listening process around the river.
A few kilometres from León we find the region of La Sobarriba, whose inhabitants are trying to give visibility to the contradictions arising in the territory from the installation of a macro-solar power plant, through Narrativas Solares project. The architect María Auxiliadora Gálvez works hand in hand with this community to create an artistic piece to be inaugurated on October 19. The piece aims at giving agency and voice to the sun within the framework of the sacrifice territories affected by macro-solar installations, which replicate the extractivist patterns of other energy resources in the territory. Here the sun is a political agent.
The fourth and last participatory artistic process Land Commons is also set to be inaugurated in October. This one is being developed by the researcher and visual artist Asunción Molinos Gordo with the communal woodlands of the small village of Couso, in Galicia. The project places value on the present and future life of the self-management of the woodlands, thus ensuring the generational replacement.
All of these works are part of Concomitentes’ “Ecological Agency” line of research and action that seeks to generate new readjustments between nature and society through art by eliciting new forms of re-enchantment. To carry out this work, the entity relies on the strategic support of the prestigious Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation.
