THE EVOLUTION OF THE COMMONS
An artistic essay on experiences of communitarian landscape management
By Luís Costa and Ana Rodríguez
December 2024 (Gafanhão, Castro Daire, Portugal)
“The mountains have belonged to the highlanders since the beginning of the world, inherited from the parents to their heirs. Whoever comes to take it away will have to deal with them”.
Aquilino Ribeiro in “When the wolves howl”
Transformations in the rural world, such as the depopulation of many villages and changes in the socio-economic habits of communities, reveal growing tensions between the roles of private, public and community property, within the framework of processes such as mass afforestation, in a context in which the hills have lost some of their functions such as grazing, clearing brush for animal bedding and the use of firewood for domestic use.
Community management in rural territories, the “baldios” as they are called in Portugal, is as old as the agro-pastoral civilizations themselves, including, in addition to land, the sharing of infrastructures for common use such as irrigation channels, mills, ovens, threshing floors, etc., based on access systems established by the communities themselves according to rights assigned to families.
The project “The evolution of the commons” explores the current meaning of community sharing, based on experiences of revitalizing common lands in the Portuguese municipality of Castro Daire, contrasted with other experiences of common use in other parts of Portugal and in Uruguay. In the latter country, where private and public land management has predominated, the extent of community management is notoriously residual.
The first phase of the project began in December 2024, with a series of interviews carried out in the parish of Gafanhão (Castro Daire), which will be expanded to other territories, with the project including aspects of geographical mapping, collective sessions, document analysis and multidisciplinary reflection, to create a final product that reflects both the validity of the concept of “communitarianism” and the challenges and opportunities it includes.
“The evolution of the commons” is a project developed by Binaural Nodar in partnership with the Sound Map of Uruguay and supported by the Municipality of Castro Daire, being also part of the Creative Europe Tramontana Network project.
