Categoria: Blog

LONG STORY SHORT

In the morning, from the top of Senora do monte, one of the city’s many mirador, nothing is visible. A thick, cool white mist rises from the ocean and covers the whole city, Christ the Redeemer, and the bridges that connect the new neighborhoods beyond the Teijo. You can hear jackhammers, squeaking streetcars, the occasional siren gliding up, down the very steep streets of Lisbon, the final destination of the first collection of radioLina.  Not that it’s any better when the sun comes out, we still can’t see much, blinded by the shiny calzada of the pavement, the pale stone of the monuments and the shimmer of the ceramics that cover half the city. It is benevolent, this fog, softening our arrival in the city, seeming to protect us from the dozens of waves, encountered, listened to, picked up or released, that come to strand at the edge of Europe. 

Freeing us from the interference is the voice of Miguel, who tries to recount the call of the Triennial of architecture, which guided our research: how heavy is a city? But as we discuss, over a codfish, in the din of Graça, the boundaries of urban and rural blurring are blurring: what is a city? And what is rural? Where does one begin and where does the other end, if everything from the sea abyss to the planets are increasingly linked and interconnected? Heavy in what sense, heavy for whom? Can conviviality be a cure for this heaviness?

It was difficult to find answers to all, but surely, in these ten tracks, collected over two weeks in places, antipodal to the urban dimension, radioLina recorded not only interferences and noises, but strong, singing waves, surely waves long enough to continue to accompany us throughout the return.

LONG STORY SHORT

Welcoming us among valleys serrated by vineyards, olive groves, and dams from where the Douro River emerges, a few kilometers past the border with Spain, is the slippery speech of an passionete chronicler, who lends epic melodies to our ride, up and down to Coimbra, the kingdom’s ancient capital. The turreted building of Portugal’s oldest university whitens overhead, reflected in the waters of the wide, placid Mondego River. It is always a few cats that open the door for us, amid meows and assaults on the dead cat, a technical term for our microphone cover, as Enrico, a physics student and morador for more than a year at Palacio de Loucura, tells us about the centuries-old history of these, to say the least, peculiar residences for young people, students and workers. Even today, the 24 Royal Republics, in their large living rooms with drawings, writings, graffiti and endless sensible ammenities and objects, beside remaining home for their inhabitants, manage to daily welcome people of all ages for lunches, dinners, meetings and parties. It is heartening to encounter small and tenacious garrisons, capable of triggering reflections on community urban living, in a Portugal that, in order to welcome more and more tourists, repairing old moldy working-class neighborhoods, where to enjoy an unmissable avocado sandwich, relies on private investment, airbandb and out-of-tune fado players.

LONG STORY SHORT

It has rained. In the dirt lane two small shepherd dogs, hay poking out of the sheets and the smell of cows, no one around. The Perriles and The Truli light a fire with dried cistus that smells of landscape and illuminates dozens of sausages hanging from the low, black ceiling of a small room, kitchen and living room, two meters by two, on one side a window through which the fog enters and on the other the fireplace, where whole grains of Portuguese coffee boil, ready to be diluted with casera grappa. Thighs of ham and black pudding, opposite to Holy Mary with baby Jesus and braids of garlic.

José claps his hands on the wooden bench and gives himself the beat, apologies, he has his voice down, as sings ancient songs of shepherds, women and smugglers, which to train memory, he repeats to his cows while working in the countryside.

While gnawing on chorizo, we remain listening, a little stunned and a little bewitched by the heat that smells of matanzas and street parties, but most of all by the subversive power of a crucial way of being together, ancient but not past, humbly harmonic.

LONG STORY SHORT

Tonight the temperature has dropped so low as to freeze the glass of our pilgrim vehicle, who for most of the day follows the shells of Santiago, protected by the whitewashed peaks of the Sierra de Cantabria and the Basque mountains to the north and the Sierra Cebollera to the south, names we honestly have never heard before. Before reaching Leon, we reverse course south, aiming not at the pinnacles of Compostela but at white wind turbines on the horizon. We drive for hours through silent sheds and empty fields, two-story houses made of stone and rough plaster, alternating with stables and a few Basque pelota fields. In the still square of San Vitero, the air smells of a fireplace and an old, doorfront stone lion stands guard over a pear tree, the small gray stone church and the only lighted light in the village, the Hotel Perales. To greet us, three watchful elders, a cylindrical cast-iron stove, a restaurant that has been closed for nearly a decade, two bottled of black Estrellas and Trinidad, formidable, unexpected hostess and church janitor, memory of the village, gruff switchboard operator and disconsolate inventor of meetings, impromptu concerts, family reunions, and jamon pinchos. Never would we have expected such a welcome in one of the many spanish pueblitos, where people die or go, leaving the land to wolves and fires, but also to stubborn shepherd women, passionate singers and proud herdsmen. All it took was a few questions, a few bell taps, and perhaps a few fingers of aguardiente, to resonate the square and wake up that lion.

LONG STORY SHORT

The iron peaks of the Pyrenees gradually crumble into unexpected canyons of mineral-rich soils and sands, the past fortunes of the Catalan and Republican countries embedded in these precipitous valleys.

We skirt westward along the mountainsides. In Aragon we encounter only dozens of birds of prey circling as high as the passes that our Dacia proudly climbs over. The first clouds have arrived, it rains all the way to Navarra, where we glide swiftly inundated by the splashes of huge trucks loaded with agricultural products, building materials and frozen foods. The peaks are no longer visible, nothing in these immense plains brackes the wind except long, horizontal hills lying among the tomatoes fields with a few villages sleeping on their backs. The sky changes again and the iron, in the mountains hidden under the rock, surrenders to the lashings that have insisted for millennia: there it is, the royal desert, reddish and yellow, streaked and crumbling. The peasants who inhabited its caves have given it away to military areas, a few tourists, and windy silence. 

Maybe it’s the fear that this cold wind will take away your words, but Ajar, Ivan, and Ramon always speak loudly, very loudly, words roll, tossed from side to side at the bar hotel restaurant by the roadside. They serve Calamari a la Romana and tortillas. Workers come in at the end of work on big Geeps, kids on bikes, lonely old men and young girls in suits, drinking berry liquor, eating nice greasy sandwiches, playing slots, watching television or just to see who’s there. Salud to them, to their proud choice to stay where they are, cheerfully together, or perhaps terribly alone, we can’t quite tell, it may be because of this strange background noise papering everything, or maybe is just the wind.

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.

LONG STORY SHORT

In Longo maï, even on the cold February mornings, which dust white dusting tools and stones and frosting noses as well as the branches of the great Linden tree, guardian of the Pigionnier, the old pigeon house, where we have been staying, there is a lot going on. There are always many things to do, and it is tempting to stay warm, to never stop spreading purple-colored wild Cornish jam on slices of warm cereal bread, while reading updates from the archipelag, the other coperatives scattered across Europe.

Johann, here for 20 years or so, invites us to follow him, freeing the way through rustling paths and old mule tracks. As we walk, the strong correspondence between intentions and actions of the community begins to reveal itself. The link with the rest of humanity, relied on the active voice of Radio Zinzine and the many publications, becomes concrete and shifts from connection to the land, to a solid agricultural organization.

Whether they are involved in transhumance, herbalism, cooking or construction, each worker or laborer tries, not without effort, to define themselves in their relationship with others and with the environment, thanks to the specific tools they choose to use. AIl longomaians are not interested in tending their beautiful Provençal garden, they want to offer practical directions, alternatives to working and social life in the city. There are many political, systemic and economic issues that are driving away with us, toward the border with Spain, but perhaps it reassures us to have understood, that moving from productivity to conviviality means substituting a technical value for an ethical value.

LONG STORY SHORT

On the slopes of the Zinzine hill, a few kilometers from the snow-capped Mount Ventoso in upper Provence, among clay hills of leafless oaks, flocks of sheep and tiny villages of pale stone, radioLina stops for a third stop, drawn by the magnetic waves of the Zinzine Radio antenna, the rebellious voice of the interdependent communities of Longo Maï. 

Burning the Terrible Zenerù puppet, was probably useful and it already feels like spring, as we follow Johann, our patient guide, showing us communal rooms, fields, workshops, construction sites, beehives and more, filled with busy people, or as we listen to Nick and Alex dreaming up new glimpses of the world, seated at a large dark wooden table, tasting whity buttered pasta and merlot, French, and Italian roundish cow cheese, carried from the Alps under microphones and bells.

The echo of what Ivan Ilich wrote in ‘73*, a year before the founding of the Grange Neuve cooperative, from where we record, came to us almost live, in the hopeful voice of Lucia, longomaian wool weaver: fight our standardized dreams, fight our industrialized imagination, fight our progammed imagination!

LONG STORY SHORT

The first day trip of radioLina is ending in front of a bonfire in the center of Apricale’s main square. We sit on a long cold stone seat and above it, a small village that leans on these very black hills like the body of a sleeping lizard, like the name of the castle that remains here to our right. No one is left in the square, the Apricalese after the aperitif, a few glasses of wine, chatter and games with cardboard boxes (the youngest ones) have gone to bed and there is not much left, but the crackling of embers and a few cats prowling under these stars of a winter day that feels like spring. Today, while walking up and down those narrow alleys protected by the strong sun of the Mediterranean, we talked with Roberta and several others inhabitants, who told us the last seventy years of the history of this small village perched in the Maritime Alps on the border with France. Stories of a welcoming land, of pottery, of returns, of sandy soils and deep streams, of olive trees, of theaters and people coming and going, able to build houses, small economies and spaces for research. People who come, stay, leave for who knows when to return. Conviviality here seems to creak silently, like these little embers, fading out, in the core of the village.