BARRUNTAREMOS (‘INKLINGS’)

2021

Single-channel video, color, sound
9 min 38 sec
Video Sonia Pueche | Sound Alberto Carlassare

Commissioned by TBA21 | Thyssen Bornemisza Art Contemporary for st_age; Curated by Soledad Gutiérrez.

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Barruntaremos (‘Inklings’) is a video piece that looks into other ways of inhabiting the world and sensing landscape through the voice and experiences of Pedro Sanz Moreno; shepherd from the region of Segovia (Spain) and knowledge-keeper of Cabañuelas, a traditional form of weather forecast transmitted from generation to generation based on the ability to read the landscape and surrounding natural elements. The film presents the elements that Pedro takes as reference and which serve as milestones in his weather predictions for the forthcoming years. 

With this piece Asunción Molinos Gordo challenges the romantic notion of landscape—deeply embedded in art historical discourse—and approaches it as a grounds for exploring more-than-humans networks that acknowledge animal intelligence and their interrelations, hence they become a far more complex and richer way of producing non-formal knowledges. The conversation is summarized as a glossary of words that are at  risk of extinction, that embody and express this ability of sensing nature and exist within its service to the community. This form of situated practice addresses global phenomena such as the climate emergency, which Sanz describes as “an interference in the signals of the landscape”. 

This work opens up a debate on how rural and ancestral forms of knowledge are represented (most of the time dismissed) by the mass media. It pays special attention to informal knowledge as a space of possibility within the rural context, in which this embodied information is understood as a (re)claiming of traditional self-organized systems of agrarian areas.