Flakes of conviviality
Hidden valleys of dark red and black rock, airy fields for cows and sheeps, sylvan resources for witches and artists, crooked villages made of stone where young urban people peacefully coexist with local citizens.
Thanks to: Ana, the two Catalan girls in residence, Prof. Federica River Cerca, Rocio Calzado Lopez
Recorded in: Farrera, Pallars, Sort, Rubio
Centr d’art i natura de farrera https://farreracan.cat
LONG STORY SHORT
The rows of lopsided Plane trees from the too much Mistral of the Provence roads accompany us southwest to the sea, and then there they are, the Pyrenees, popping up from behind the yellow reeds of Perpignan, piercing the sky.
We look for a boulangerie among narrow canyons of metamorphic rocks and gray villages, where almost everything is closed. All the way to the border with Spain the view opens onto barren, dry pastures. There is little snow, only a chip of something at the top, horses and cows, the only encounters so far, lick disconsolately at remnants of ice. The vegetation keeps changing: oaks, wild beeches, lodgepole pines and hooked pines, parade through endless curves and villages dressed up like mountains, clinging to or protected by red, ochre, still purple rocks, and finally, where we stop, the stone is black, shiny, flaky, breaking up with our hands, becoming potion dust.
Anna is in her seventies and in her workshop that smells of ointments and herbs gathered in the woods, once a stable for her two hundred sheep, she smiles as her young border colly, which tries to sabotage our microphone.
Holding together the inhabitants of Farrera, at 1,600 meters, beneath snow-capped peaks, iron mines and vast pastures, is a thread, first woollen, then electric. Here somebody really dreamt of electric shpees… The inhabitants over the years come and go, unafraid of changing jobs, restoring old shelters, living in a cold, loneliness and a strenuous but chosen frugality, which thanks to a new road, cultural initiatives and unfortunately climate change, continues, to change, to evolve, not to be chopped up but to remain the foundation and roof of the community.