Nau Côclea
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Highlights
Border Correspondence
Among the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress in Washington is a small collection of coloured envelopes once addressed to Walter Benjamin. They were sent to 10 rue Dombasle, Paris. Orange, yellow, pale blue. Today they are empty, but their surfaces are covered in tiny handwriting: corrected sentences, crossings-out, additions. Benjamin had reused
El Grand Tour 2023
This is a work shaped out of binaural recordings (please listen with closed headphones or quality earbuds to hear the immersive sound) made by me during a 3-week hike through the landscape of Aragon (Spain) starting from Pont de Suert to Sant Esteve de la Sarga. A group of artists walked all through the pre-Pyrenees,
Confluence 2 hosted by Nau Côclea
Do you like to travel on foot? Grand Tour is a 250km walk with poets, dancers, storytellers, visual artists and musicians. 21 days across beautiful landscape and hidden places in Catalonia, it is a shared celebration and this year, you can be part of it.
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+1 WALC Confluence 6 hosted by Nau Côclea documenting walking art, featuring Ernesto Pujol.
How do you document Walking art? Asks your host, Clara Gari from Nau Côclea. For some artists documenting their work is a process of making a further an artwork in itself, for others the walk is the document. In 1998, the CDAN (The Centre of Art & Nature) in Huesca, Spain, commissioned a piece for
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Articles elsewhere
Camallera Sound Walk
November /December 2023 The Camallera Sound Walk is a walk around the border of the town of Camallera. There are 12 stages to the walk, and at each stage there is an original sound montage to listen to. It was created during an artist residency at Nau Côclea, Camallera, in Cataluña. The walk is on … Continue reading Camallera Sound Walk
• Artist Residency, Cataluña
November 2023 I am happy to say that I am in Camallera near Girona, Cataluña / Catalonia, where I am in residence at Nau Côclea (Centre de Creació Contemporània Nau Côclea). I plan to make a Sound Walk. Map of Camallera, Cataluña I plan to walk around the edge of the town, the boundary of the area, listening to and recording ambient sounds. The rhythm of my feet will undoubtedly raise 'stories' from the soil, of the past and present. I will be responding with my own and others’ voices in response to these, aiming to create a rich soundscape of song, musical instrument and found-sounds which will encapsulate the ambience of the place.I have often travelled around the edge of somewhere for an artistic project (in Edinburgh, for example I have led walks around Granton and Leith) and I find that a ring of steps can mark-out a space in which magic can happen. Marking a boundary by human means (as opposed to in, or on a vehicle) and meeting people who live and move along it, is an interesting and enlightening experience. It is one which offers an opportunity to find out more about what and who lives on either side and the nature of separation and unity in this context. As I walk, I will be paying equal attention to the plants, insect and animal life which we share these edgeland sites with, especially observing the effects I have on them, and their presence at specific times of day and at this turn of the seasons. Unidentified flower in the Third Landscape of Camallera Looking at the map, the walk will probably cover a mixed manufacturing, retail, municipal, residential, touristic, rural and agricultural setting, maybe also “Undecided fragment[s] of the Planetary Garden … Neglected areas and wastelands” of the Third Landscape. The psychogeographer in me is always ferreting into nooks and noticing crannies of this sort. (With thanks to Laia Noal for guiding me to this term.) The Third Landscape where small mountains of different grades of ground mirror the Pyrenees in the distance. Camallera When I am in the research and preparation stage of making a Sound Walk, I follow the signs; I take notice of what happens around me, what books land in my lap, and conversations I happen to hear on the radio or when I’m walking. I have been reading about the suppression of freedom and the Catalan language during the Civil War of 1936-39, and all the human suffering caused by Francisco Franco up until 1975. I am fascinated by the Pact of Forgetting (given a legal basis in 1977), a political decision which was made, “in the name of ensuring a smooth transition to democracy” (smithsonianmag.com), and which “also committed the government to “la desmemoria” (disremembering), a policy that entailed avoiding anything that could awaken the memory of the past, such as the observation of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, in 1986…” (Encarnación, New York Times). More recently, the Historical Memory Law (2007) has allowed for “a debate on the civil war "after so many years of silence".” (The Guardian) and there has been interest in engaging with a recognition of the resulting grief. Some of the Civil War mass graves have been opened, and new rituals are being enacted around the acknowledgement of the loss on many levels. I come to this residency with many years of embodied study of death, grief and loss, personally, and through my Shiatsu work, death cafes, and writing. A recurring topic arising from participants at death cafes is our community tendency to ignore death or struggle to find ways to acknowledge it. Walking, Cataluña When I discovered that my visit corresponded with the annual walk across the Pyrénées from France in memory of Walter Benjamin, I knew I must join it. Benjamin was fleeing the Nazi regime in 1940, and was directed across the mountains by Lisa Fittko. He received bad news on arrival in Port Bou on the Spanish side and died by suicide that night, before being able to finally escape to the United States. The coincidence came as no surprise, and it is likely that the Sound Walk that I will be making during my residency will concern loss and its inevitable companion, renewal, as a result. I won't know what exactly will happen until I begin. This level of inter-generational trauma takes time, so much time, to leave the gene pool. It surges through bloodlines ... How to tell a new story of resilience and hope? ... How can we honour the suffering of our ancestors – of those who came before us – but still try to unravel the chains we find ourselves bound by? Is the answer held within the very soil... Is the answer held in the residue the ghosts leave behind? — Kerri ni Dochartaigh writing about the Irish Troubles in Thin Places p186 Collecting a feather a day (project began during the Covid pandemic). Feathers have often been associated with grief (see Emily Dickinson) I have already invited some local artists to sing and play to and in the place, people who belong here. If you are from the region or outside and are interested in this project and able to come between 20 November and 2 December (not 24th), I am inviting you to join me for one day or part of one day. Come and walk and listen, and share your feelings. Your contributions will join together in a co-created Sound Walk which will then live on in Camallera for anyone to join at a later date.Dates: 20 November and 2 December. There is one bed for you to stay a night in the artist's cottage if you need to. Let me know if you are interested! tamsinlgrainger@gmail.com Caption for photo gallery above, from left: Forest Bound, Festival of Terminalia, Festivities and DelegatesThe Artist Residency is part of the Separation and Unity Project (Caledonia / Catalonia). You may also be interested in other parts: El Grand Tour, Girona mini-pilgrimage, and Festivities and Delegates.References:Smithsonian Magazine https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/battle-memory-spanish-civil-war-180969338/New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/01/06/turning-away-from-painful-chapters/forgetting-in-order-to-move-onThe Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/oct/11/spain.internationalManifesto of the Third Landscape https://teh.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/TEH-Publication-Manifesto-of-Third-Landscape-145x225mm-2022-WEB-Spreads.pdf
• Sound Walk, Cataluña
November 2023 I am happy to say that I am on my way to Camallera near Girona in Cataluña / Catalonia, where I am taking up an Artist’s Residency at Nau Côclea (Centre de Creació Contemporània Nau Côchlea). I will be walking around the edge of the town, the boundary of the area, listening to … Continue reading Sound Walk, Cataluña
• El Grand Tour
El Grand Tour is an annual walk in the Pyrenees and its foothills which I joined this August 2023. It was organised by Clara Garí (Nau Côclea), Beatriz Aisa (geographer), and colleagues. Every day we do a stage of about 15 km with artists who have projects and proposals to share with the walkers.On the … Continue reading El Grand Tour
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Walking a Grand Tour