Ecological Spirals and Mineral Journeys - featuring parts of my contribution to a new book by António Monteiro.
'Not Circles, but Spirals: 4-D landscape flows and nature-culture entanglements in the Côa Valley, Portugal'
There is a slow, quiet unraveling at work across some interior landscapes of southern Europe...
— a loosening of human grip, a softening of boundaries, an accelerating shift towards more ecological entanglements. Such a hybrid enmeshed future may have echoes of the past - but this is not a simple cycle of ‘returning’, nor even ‘rewilding’. Perhaps then, if not a circling-back, a more appropriate visual metaphor here is the spiral; a morphing cyclical movement that introduces a state which is similar, but different? A new formula for coexistence?
What has been, in recent centuries, a territory mapped, claimed, colonised and controlled - characterised by enclosure, harvesting, extraction, extermination - now begins to blur into ambiguity and enmeshment. Fields no longer tilled (or ‘cleaned’) present us with new textures, patterns, tapestries. Hu- man pathways peter out, and merge into the expanding mycelial-like complexity of animal tracks. Field-boundary walls of stone collapse gradually, to become lines of low vegetated, camouflaged mounds. Vernacular buildings increasingly host creeping claddings of lichens, mosses, grasses; the unstoppable spreading carpet of life-forms powered by photosynthesis. Timeless solar-power in action. In a way this is a ‘re-covery’ — in the sense of being ‘covered again’ in a living, breathing green skin.
Here in the Côa Valley, the soundscape is still punctuated by occasional quarry blasts, chain-saws and distant vehicles, but the rich acoustic weaving of birdsong is increasingly sensed. Throughout the valley- -region, there is widespread abandonment, made visible through various processes of transitioning - from a marginal rural (agri)culture of tending and taking, to a situation characterised by letting go. The terrain is newly animated in unexpected ways. What emerges is not wilderness, but something in-between — something provisional, dynamic, and strangely enchanting. Some of the change processes are human mediated (endangered species protection, reintroductions, restrictions on hunting etc.), but most of the transformation is happening ‘naturally’ - without human intervention.
On my many walks through these hills, granite ridges, deep-cut valleys, I have had a sense of moving within a palimpsest of time, sensing legacies of diverse forces. In the case of past human effort, we see terraces carved into slopes; stones aligned with care and skill. And very evident are the thousands of pigeon-houses (pombais), structures that were once inhabited by functionality and purposefulness. These isolated dovecotes, often half-crumbled and mossed over, are ghostly white reminders and repositories of persistent and determined human efforts to survive in a sparse, harsh land. They do not speak simply of ruination, but rather of a continuous process of morphing, of a certain fluidity. Ongoingness.
As someone with a background in ‘reading rocks’ (via previous geological studies), I find that this landscape carries a mineral language that is far more powerful and enduring than the fading, and relatively short, phase of agriculture. The natural materials of the older cultural buildings of this rural upland — stone, lime plaster, olive wood beams, slate roofs — begin, in this phase of unraveling, to reassert their elemental origins. They seem to breathe again, no longer shaped only by human need, desire and aesthetics, but in dialogue with wind, moisture, frost, and root-action; also with decay and disassembly.
This is not a return to some pristine wild. Partly, it is the slow surfacing of the timeless elemental — a kind of remembering, perhaps, of how the land once wove itself, before agriculture, before palaeolithic hunters, before megafauna, before even the slow sculpting of the valley by the seemingly timeless river. And in that remembering, we have an opportunity to form a new aesthetic and ecological vocabulary — not nostalgic, not techno-futuristic, but profoundly attentive and present, sensing and tuning-in on many levels at the same time. Clearly, it’s not easy for us contemporary humans to find forward-looking, creative ways of being intimate with our surrounding biogeography? Many (most?) of us have lost the code, the sensitivity of deep multi-sensorial contact.
Poetics - or ‘geopoetics’ - involves entering a mind/body state that seeks to open up to spirit of place, as part of being creatively present in a landscape. For me, geopoetics also embraces experimentation, and is about elegantly aligning the linear, dendritic forms of rational knowledge (scientific, field-data etc.) with sensibilities connected with a more rhizomic imagination (intuitions, serendipity, lateral thinking etc.). In this, I am influenced and inspired by the words of Canadian poet Don McKay, who speaks of geopoetry as providing:
“a crossing point, a bridge over the infamous gulf separating scientific from poetic frames of mind, a gulf which has not served us well, nor the planet we inhabit with so little reverence or grace.” (DonMcKay, 2011)
This way of thinking - and feeling - “brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back” (quoting James Joyce) to the fundamental geology of the Côa Valley, dominated in the north by schist-type rocks, and to the south by granites.The fabric of the pigeon houses of course reflects this deeper mineral foundation.
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| Photo: Aurélio Maia |
Furthermore, the skills and craft of working with these two rock types are very different. In the scorching summer of 2023, when constructing the land-art sculpture,‘Habitat / A Treasure House’, we were able to collect granite stones strewn around the site. Assembling these into strong durable walls requires an experienced eye, and a sensitive feel for the three dimensional shape of each and every stone.The process with schist construction is much more about quarrying; much more about building up a structure with uniform layers.There is here a poetic echo of the deep-time physical formation of the original rock types - igneous granite cooling and crystallising from amorphous molten magma, while the schist derives from slow sedimentary layering, or strata formation. Hence the sub-title of this piece (4-D landscape flows...). Our focus of attention is on 3-D structures, but it is the 4th dimension - time - that has the last word.
Addendum: some words I wrote recently, reflecting on the residency in the Côa Valley.
I have noticed the hidden, the tiny, the micro-cosmos.
I have noticed the rich intangible culture - of song, poetry, music - nurtured by the people.
I have noticed the need to zoom-in to smaller and smaller areas; to go deeper.
I have noticed that it takes time; it all takes time; and never enough time.
I have noticed that there are many ways of knowing; many ways of seeking; many ways of seeing; many ways of hearing.
I feel that the sense of potential for abundance - in the landscape, in the people - has grown over the residency. This is anyway an inherent quality of the natural world. With time, and patience, the vital abundance will return, after many centuries of destructive extractivism. It's optimal of course if human society embraces and co-creates this. And I feel that artistic modes, based on aesthetics, geo(poetics), symbolism and play - can help open doors and vistas for more care and connection. Inspiration is needed. These need to be valued, if mindsets are to shift and change. The journey away from nature consciousness has been slow, and the journey 'back' to connection and biophilia will likely also be slow. If artistic activity can help with moving this on, and increasing empathy and coexistence, that's a huge motivation.
