GIRONA — “I have been watching you all afternoon. I have seen you lying on the ground, following colored flags, listening to stories about this place, observing the landscape with VR glasses. I have seen you holding hands. You have spent the afternoon talking about me.” It is Nature speaking and she does so through a female, artificial voice. A voice that pronounces words appearing on a LED screen installed in the middle of a meadow and surrounded by fourteen speakers broadcasting words and industrial sounds.
In front of this screen, a group of 180 people is sitting on the ground, with tired bodies and in silence after almost seven hours wandering the Celrà forest, in the province of Girona. They participated in “Shared Landscapes” a project made up of seven pieces by seven different European creators, performed in the forest, temporarily converted into a stage and scenery.
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During the seven hours the project lasts, these 180 people lay on the ground with headphones to listen to a six-year-old girl asking a forest guard what a forest on fire looks like or why so many fairy tales take place in a forest. They observe the landscape from the perspective of a military drone, they enjoy the song of an extinct bird, they hold hands, they look at the sky and they listen, among the olive trees, to the music of a wind orchestra.
They have tea with a physically disabled person, they listen to Faustine Bas-Defossez, member of the European Environment Agency, talk about her work “on the great beast” — the Common Agricultural Policy — or to a specialist in bioacoustics sharing her knowledge about the fruit fly, the lark or the robin. Or to Josep, a farmer who cultivates the lands of Celrà, sharing his memories of that place while Boney M.’s “Daddy Cool” plays in his tractor.
And so they read on that LED screen the voice of a Nature that will remind them all that she was already there when our species lived in caves and gathered around the fire, when we raised walls and borders, when we began to have our lives regulated by states and religions, when we replaced trust with money. That voice accuses us of having colonized, domesticated and dehumanized it and asks: could you be looking at me in silence without these words? I don’t think so, it answers for us.
The voice tells its audience about borders created with words that build landscapes, landscapes that mutate into metaphors, metaphors that become walls. Then the industrial and unsettling environment sound intensifies and Nature blames us for having declared war with it since we began to invent our world: we no longer think about the seasons, it says, nor about the tides, nor about the movement of birds, we only think about money, information or contacts which makes us terrified of loneliness, madness and poverty.
As the sun sets, those 180 people take in that monumental rant with which the Spanish company El Conde de Torrefiel, formed by Tanya Beyeler and Pablo Gisbert, questions in a subtle, yet radical way what has happened during those seven hours in which the forest and the countryside have become the stage and scenery of fiction.
“How much did you pay to see me like an animal in the zoo?” the voice asks.
A picnic, military drone and the landscape of capitalism
At the beginning of October, the Celrà forest hosted the Spanish premiere of the seven performances composing “Shared Landscapes” as part of the programme of the Girona International Festival of Performing Arts Temporada Alta, which takes place between October and December in Girona, Catolonia.
“Shared Landscapes” is a journey through seven performances in which perspective and point of view are questioned.
It was the last European stop of the project which toured in Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Portugal, Italy and France. Led by Caroline Barneaud (Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne) and Stefan Kaegi (Rimini Protokoll), Shared Landscapes is a project co-produced by European institutions such as the Avignon Festival, the Berliner Festspiele, the Portuguese foundation Culturgest and Temporada Alta, with a global production budget of around 300,000 euros, partly financed by European funds.
The result: seven performances of theater, dance, visual art and music by artists of different nationalities and disciplines. All these artistic propositions convey questions that explore the links between art, nature and representation, questions that also have to do with common and collective experience, with listening and attention, with the discovery of all that we do not hear or see when we actually go to the countryside, when we get lost in a forest, when we think, proudly, that we are in contact with nature.
“Shared Landscapes” is a journey through seven performances in which perspective and point of view are questioned. These performances offer a rich listening experience, and they echo the Land Art movement, born at the end of the 1960s, which intimately linked artwork and landscape.
Each performance proposes a different perspective and story about our relationship with nature. One of them is a conversation between a psychoanalyst, a forest ranger, a girl, a meteorologist and a singer about how the landscape defines us as a society (Stefan Kaegi and Georgina Suria). Another one is a picnic next to a painting by German Romantic landscape painter Friedrich, as a frame to be subverted by someone with a physical disability (Chiara Bersani and Marco D’Agostin).
Begum Erciyas and Daniel Kötter chose a virtual reality experience elevating the point of view of the audience over the forest, like a military drone, prepared for war. Ari Benjamin Meyers imagined a musical conversation between six local musicians with wind instruments performing four pieces to be enjoyed while crouching, lying down or hiding in the forest.
Thanks to headphones, Sofía Díaz and Vitor Roriz want the audience to call upon a team dynamic through a collective choreography to explore the links between human beings and vegetation. Using the same audio device, the public switches to a panoramic performance, on farmland, listening to a farmer, a European civil servant and a bioacoustics expert speaking from afar about their respective jobs (Émilie Rousset). The last piece by El Conde de Torrefiel focuses on the strategies and the landscape imposed by capitalism to take advantage of nature.
Almost no footprint
“We are all very concerned about climate change, about the relationship between humans and non-humans, about what nature means for this increasingly hybrid and technical being that we are, a being that destroys nature, but also admires it or gets inspired by it to create,” explains Stefan Kaegi. “But all the projects that address this relationship happen between four white walls, in the stage space, we see video installations with artificial plants at the biennials and we stay within the city, where the cultural budget is concentrated. That is why we decided that this project had to take people, physically, to the place that is being transformed by climate change, a place where they can also be exposed to the unpredictable.”
“We wanted our footprints to be almost just memories.”
All the performances were designed by their creators to adapt to the forest and landscape of each country, they are translated into each language, and brought to life with the help of local technicians and staff and the use of light, mobile and removable infrastructures.
All this with the minimal environmental footprint on the territory. “We wanted our footprints to be almost just memories: the memory of having been together in this place, of having lived a different experience,” explains Kaegi. “We thought about theater outside of the theater, trying to find out what it would change and bring to our art, and how theater would benefit these territories. We wanted to find a way to be together in and with nature, with all the difficulties that this implies and all those limitations regarding accessibility, climate, or unpredictability.”
“Shared Landscapes” has also been a huge learning experience for the artists who have participated and had to keep their work’s technical requirements to a minimum. “For example, we said that there would be no unnecessary piece of technology, we did not want to have an electrical generator or travel with mega trucks as if we were part of some open-air music festival. We’ve been through some challenges, like not having an office, or plugs, or having to think about where to install bathrooms and how to do it in an eco-friendly way, or figuring out how to feed the public or how to bring them here so they don’t use their own cars.”
For Caroline Barneaud, the other curator of the project, the vocation of the seven parts of “Shared Landscapes” revolves around the idea of “bringing our audience, artists and technicians as close as possible, as a community, with the traditional tools of theater, to this stage that is alive, and creating a network not of urban theaters, but of green and rural peripheries.” Barneaud tells Climática her next projects include developing Émilie Rousset’s play independently for it to be performed on farmland in different parts of Europe.
