They sink their hands and their creative nerve in nature and with those who inhabit it.
They build cathedrals of music, letters and images that confirm that
artistic and cultural modernity
also resides in rural areas.
They are proof that contemporary vigor comes from there.
And that from there it is possible to achieve what is understood by success in the city, public recognition.
Now that so many are looking at the countryside -2020 of the pandemic, 2020 of yearning for the open air-, it is convenient to look at those who were already there, to deny clichés.
Away from the bustle of the city, fashions and cultural imperatives,
Rodrigo Cuevas, Alfonso Kint, Lucía Camón and Gabi Martínez
amaze and move with the power of thunder.
Whoever decides to listen to them, participate, ends up drained as in the cool summer rains.
They dared, like that other one they called crazy and was the mockery of the people.
Until in his old age, after 33 years of stubborn work, he proved that
a rural postman can also be an artist
.
Ferdinand Cheval
built with his own hands, without academic knowledge, the
Ideal Palace
.
A unique construction in the hills of Hauterives (France), overflowing with dreams, which in 1969 was declared a Historic Monument by the then Minister of Culture
André Malraux.
A good mirror for our four interviewees, who only after moving to the countryside managed to establish themselves as artists or recognize and develop their own language.
"Until I went to live in the mountains, I did not become an artist", affirms the singer
Rodrigo Cuevas
(Oviedo, 1985), multifaceted and immeasurable, who in October premiered
Llabores
together with the musician and composer
Raül Refree
, a former musical partner by
Silvia Pérez Cruz, Rosalía and Lina
.
Rodrigo Cuevas completes the poker.
"Although I make music since I was a child, until I came here, I had animals and I discovered the traditional culture, I did not do a truly personal project," he responds from
Vegarrionda (Asturias)
, the town of 15 inhabitants where he lives.
The cities seem full of possibilities, but the filmmaker
Alfonso Kint
and the actress and poet
Lucía Camón
, couple and creators of the documentary
Soñando un lugar
(2018)
, coincide with Cuevas.
"The city took a lot of time from me and here you listen more to yourself and your impulses," explains Kint, who began the film by recording his daily life to explore a shared reflection: they needed a sharp change;
another upbringing, perhaps a happy and curious hummingbird, for his daughter, Greta.
And there they went:
to Torralba de Ribota (Zaragoza)
, 174 inhabitants.
Camón adds: "In Madrid I had an excess of social life. Here you think more clearly and doors were opened to materials and sensibilities with which we did not work. Now we tell different stories".
And they reap juicy fruits:
seven nominations for the Goya.
The writer Gabi Martínez worked as a pastor for six months.CARLOS GARCÍA POZO
They are not tourists who "come with their Wi-Fi and their three-and-a-half-meter hedge, buy at Mercadona and don't even talk to the people here," as Cuevas criticizes.
Our protagonists
get involved in the territory
in such a way that it transforms its ecosystems.
"Not having fluency with the environment, neither was it literary," explains writer
Gabi Martínez
, versed in travel literature, about the creative blockage that he has reported in his recent
A truly change
, with the second edition already secured.
"It was essential to stay, be, breathe, share, associate with the people there and understand a lot, for myself to find myself calm enough, to write and internalize the necessary words," as recounted by his six months as a pastor in
Extremadura Siberia
.
With the intention of reproducing the arduous conditions in which his own mother, also a shepherd, grew up, Martínez lived in a shelter without light, with a bonfire and a well, and with the discontinuous company of a mastiff.
He ended up so deeply rooted that today he defends projects from there, such as those of the
Black Caravan Association
.
AGAINST CLICHÉS
Freedom, time and space
are the coordinates that the four artists repositioned on their maps, to enter distant paths from the bucolic clichés or the contempt of the rural, so well-worn in our country.
Those extended in
idyllic postcards
that
hipsters
perpetrate
pre and post pandemic today, bragging about how authentic and
echo
their life is (with Instagram filters, of course) since they seemed to go to the countryside.
Capable of turning manure into cuqui and ignoring the neighbors and the lack of services, of access to housing and land, which their inhabitants also support.
Or, on the contrary, those stereotypes of those who exhibit an intellectual superiority over rural culture,
labeling
its inhabitants as
rednecks or feral
, as if the clock had stopped in
Los Santos Inocentes
and did not protect infinity of knowledge.
Like continuing to feed the planet in full pandemic lockdown.
Neither idealized, nor disdainful, nor even creators limiting a thematic stronghold.
Our protagonists expand like universes in the story of contemporaneity.
The current and urgent.
For modern them,
with mud up to their ankles
.
In a few years, Rodrigo Cuevas has gone from acting in front of 10 people, at that premiere in Madrid where he distributed eggs from his corral, to shaking a
Teatro de la Zarzuela
, full, open-mouthed, in a paralysis of astonishment, on the last day of November .
With his previous
Barbián
and
Manual de Cortejo, he
cajoled everyone, in a flaming cocktail of electric folklore, cabaret impudence and popular singing and charm.
The ancestral and the provocative in harmony.
QUESTION.
-What does it feel like to wake up in a town of 15 inhabitants and know that the Teatro de la Zarzuela is going to fill up?
REPLY.
-Freedom of not having to be in Madrid to achieve it.
All our lives we have been told that you have to go to the big city because here you will not be able to prosper.
Now, with
Raül Refree,
she has entered a forest of songs, linked to the traditional work of women, which they have mixed with the archive of the American folklorist
Alan Lomax
and with current sounds.
"
We traveled through Asturias for two weeks recording ladies who sang and played
. A collection of songs came out, but also vocal games that accompany work, such as the one done to call bees when they swarm, or set the rhythm when lifting stones in the quarries ... They are very beautiful, with a lot of
potential and anthropological and artistic interest
", he tells enthusiastically about
Llabores
, a work that has not yet been released as an album and whose tour they have left on
standby
.
The same illusion radiates to talk about
Gelita d'El Cabanón
, whom they recorded on that tour and who, he says, began to sing because she lived on top of a winch.
Forbidden to women, only countrymen entered there, singing
the tunes that she listened to every night from her bed
and, thus, she learned to interpret them.
"It's amazing how she sings, I love her, she's wonderful."
Compliment that she also uses for Oceania and Guillermo, her neighbors "perhaps favorites, that if I affirm it can put me against others", laughs, because she is "so sensitive, she speaks such an archaic, precious Asturian", while he is " an exhaustive connoisseur of the traditional "and teaches you the names of the plants in Latin, Asturian, Spanish and English.
Cuevas absorbs everything, while also taking care of his chickens and donkeys Xuana and La Faraona ("what a drooping ears they have"), aware that folklore always springs from any loophole.
"The hip-hop of the streets of New York will be the folklore of the future
.
"
And he does not exaggerate the simile, since it is the spontaneous expression of the people, the wisdom of the weight of the years.
An oral heritage "at risk of disappearing".
AGAINST FORGETTING
Gabi Martínez also writes against this amnesia.
The one that condemns
rural life and autochthonous races
to
extinction,
because they do not enter into the frenzied rhythms of the market or the urban appeal, as recounted in
A change of truth
about the black merino.
"This sheep takes only one more week to reach the weight to trade with it. Being not so profitable, it is being progressively eliminated.
Organic farmers are forced to sell land, herds, and they are taking medication
, going to the psychologist, because they see no way out. "
In his book, Martínez delved into the concepts of
Spain, Nature and Mother
, to conclude that
the future must be born in the countryside
, that all the turns that allow human survival must take place from there.
"There is a thread between culture and nature that can change things
.
"
And for example, his novel.
Timid
liternatura
in our country, but torrent in
France or Germany
, land of environmentalists, which is a genre most appreciated and where your book and be translated.
Recently it was also cited in the
Extremadura courts
.
The reason?
Rescue another forgotten profession: that of
resin workers
, surrounded by the pandemic.
"There is a political consensus, they say that you have to act, but many times they stay there and nothing comes out due to ideological tensions or economic interests."
But he also encourages: "If now the resin producer has reached the Cortes, if they are talking about sheep, it is because through the book, through that art, you can reach other places, that emotion that leads us to change things. It should be an urgent bet in our country. "
Lucía Camón and Alfonso Kint pose in their town, Torralba.CARLOS GARCÍA POZO
The same one that Alfonso Kint (Madrid, 1976) and Lucía Camón (Valencia, 1975) embarked on after moving to Torralba nine years ago, and which ended in red carpet history and the future.
They spread the new course to friends and family, to more creators in search of wide landscapes:
"There are about 20 new people in town
.
"
They founded the collective
Pueblos en Arte
, an antidote also against depopulation, as shown in their documentary, which is now being shown in Argentina and Chile, and soon in Italy.
They organize festivals like the Grasshopper or Poetodos;
artistic residencies with actresses
Eva Rufo
and
María Morales
;
film screenings;
poetic vermouth with
María Sánchez
or
Simón Partal
;
workshops like the theater by
Pablo Messiez
... Giant names.
"Culture moves people and you make a hole in their hearts, in their day to day," Camón emphasizes on the other end of the phone.
They are preparing for the cold, because they heard the cranes sing days ago.
There, sounds, speeches, are sharpened
... "In a photography workshop, we distributed disposable cameras for neighbors captasen what they thought important when they saw the exhibition were thrilled discovered that their vision of the people worth
Les It costs a lot to give value to their own environment
", says Camón.
And Kint continues: "It is a slab since the 50s, when people went to work in the cities of workers, porters ... The great migration, which knocked down all its charm and everything that they could believe was good" .
For both of them it is an encouragement to turn their artistic vision with the tradition and frank speech of the people.
"They realize the potential they treasure in their culture, and it is very beautiful," reflects Camón.
Although, above all, they highlight an achievement:
new neighbors arrive;
they have bought a house
.
The merit also lies in being a community, in creating a less defeatist narrative about the rural, giving value.
Sentence Camón: "You can be the most modern and live in the town.
Lorca believed in the town."
And it was universal.
Camón and Kint, with other members of 'Pueblos en Arte' CARLOS GARCÍA POZO
Also the postman Cheval.
Far from the Parisian boiling point, he used the stones he collected on his work walks, his imagination and the magazines he carried in his satchel to create a work so avant-garde that it ended up inspiring the surrealists
André Breton
and
Max Ernst.
Cheval stood outside the norm.
He showed that with elementary materials and in the rumor of nature art can be molded, even going beyond official modernity.
As well as Rodrigo, Gabi, Lucía and Alfonso.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
Know more
culture
music
literature
cinema
See links of interest
Check Lottery
Real Madrid - Granada CF
Olimpia Milan - TD Systems Baskonia
Bologna - Atalanta
Milan - Lazio
Napoli - Torino