Soup in Galicia

Say you are a frog. A frog on the receiving end of a torrential flow of gutter water. This is your habitat. Each adaptation from your ancestors and instinct grafted on in school and society brings you here. You love the water; you bask in the flow.

But this June, eight of us hopped onto mossy, lichen encrusted rocks and into the more relational soup of the Fragas do Eume in Galicia, Spain. We spent three weeks with the brilliant team of Fundación RIA and impossibly energetic and multihyphenate Ana María Durán Calisto on the project of “designing the design brief.” We were invited to “sense the territory” and tap into networks of care, kinship, and reciprocity to propose new outlines for intervention. I feel particularly grateful to learn from the Galicians tending to the commons, where the commons are not some abstraction, but a vivid, sustaining practice of communal land management. We waded through the contradictions of contemporary rural life stitched together in pre-modern smallholding plots among major extractive timber and energy interests. And we mapped this all out from the vantage point of our posh boarding school between episodes of LeLaLes: Fluid Love in Sir David Chipperfield’s salon, living through our own academic-tourist contradictions.

My greatest takeaway, and something of a common refrain on our final night, was how this experience pointed towards forms of spatial practice in real working relation with community and the land, especially as we search for ways after YSoA to tunnel towards our territories. How can new forms of practice move past clientelism and towards true participation with and from communities? Are non-profit social ecology planning offices necessary? Or can these practices at the forefront of responding to the climate-health-economy polycrisis find their way into true social and political practice? Where is this locus of collective intelligence and energy and how can the architect tap in?