Drawn from the text 1943 : le surréalisme et nous (1943: surrealism and us) by the Martinican poet Suzanne Césaire

This project approaches the dynamics involved in the symbolic construction of landscape, questioning its very notion with the concepts of land and territory. Starting from Galicia’s historical and cultural complexity, we propose to explore, through the work of a group of artists from diverse geographical and disciplinary backgrounds, what lies beyond any construction of landscape: what cannot be represented, what resists being captured as an image.

These reflections are particularly relevant today, as the homogenising effects of tourism, extractivism or the imposition of a global identity over local culture – to name just a few examples – threatens to erase the possibility of living cultures deeply rooted in their territories. At the same time, there is a need to reclaim popular cultures beyond folklorisation processes and to understand the cultural complexity shaped by comings and goings, migrations and diasporas that cross different geographies. Ultimately, to imagine once again a world in which many worlds can fit.

We seek to develop a project that approaches these questions focusing on a local and a small-scale perspective, creating honest dialogues between different geographies and placing the work and knowledge of women artists at its centre. The themes, ideas and very structure of the project gradually intertwine through a process of collective work, supported by an assembly comprising some of the participants. The project thus takes shape thanks to a polyphony of voices emerging from the dialogue with the artists and from the reflections generated by their works. These voices and gestures spring from specific territories, from situated experiences and forms of knowledge, and are connected through proximity to build spaces of encounter.

Viewed from above on Google Maps, Itabira – located in the heart of the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais – reveals a heartbreaking landscape. Surrounded by open-cast mines, this municipality was one of the major gold mining areas from the 18th century onwards. When the gold ran out, its iron ore reserves began to be mined on a massive scale.

The Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote in 1940: ‘For some years I lived in Itabira. / Mostly, I was born in Itabira. / That’s ’why I’m sad, proud: made of iron’.

Drummond suffers for Itabira and declares: ‘Itabira is just a photograph on the wall. But how it hurts!’.

To think about landscape, we must first acknowledge the distance that the term itself establishes with the territory. According to the Galician philosopher and ethnologist Emilio Araúxo, those who have worked in the fields have never called it ‘landscape’, but rather ‘land’. A similar distance is described by the Galician poet Manuel María, who, in 1970, in his poem A paisaxe é fermosa (The landscape is beautiful), dismantles the idealised vision of landscape often shared by high culture and tourism to offer us another, less idyllic one: that of those who walk its paths, work in its fields and experience in their own bodies what contemplation turns into landscape. At the end of the poem, the author reveals ‘the dark and cruel reality hidden behind the beautiful forms of the landscape’.

La vuelta de Don Francisco (Regreso del indiano) [The return of Don Francisco (Arrival of the indiano)], a large-scale painting produced by the Galician artist Alfonso Daniel Rodríguez Castelao in 1916, depicts the return of an indiano (a Spanish emigrant who has made good in America) after having prospered as an emigrant. In the foreground, Don Francisco and the elderly man who welcomes him with a solemn look on this face are observed by a child emerging from behind the wall that runs across the scene and leads our gaze towards the background, where the rest of the group walks up the path dejectedly, carrying their belongings.

Contrary to what has often been claimed, Castelao does not portray a picturesque scene, but one permeated by abuse, which reveals not only the great man’s disdain for his own people, but also the shadow of colonial exploitation on the other side of the Atlantic. The child’s gaze – a recurring pictorial device to introduce a figure who directly engages the viewer – turns us into witnesses.

In 1957, in issue 30 of the magazine Galicia Emigrante (Emigrant Galicia), Luis Seoane described the films of Xosé Suárez and Carlos Velo with a statement that could serve as one of the key principles underpinning this project: ‘It was not a jingoistic, picturesque cinema, falsely exalting Galicia. It was socially authentic’.

Seoane was referring to Galicia (1936) and Mariñeiros (Fishermen, 1938), filmed by Velo and Suárez, respectively, on the eve of the Spanish Civil War. Beyond the vicissitudes and losses surrounding both films, his words suggest a way of approaching this project: to explore a territory through its own stories, without reducing it to a self-contained image.

A land shaped by comings and goings, with all its complexities; often regarded as peripheral, yet also understood as a meeting point for multiple crossings and, from this perspective, as a starting point for broader analyses.

Who constructs the idea of landscape, and why? Where do its margins lie? What is the relationship between this construction and the violence inflicted by some people on others? Is whatever lies outside this construction what truly defines a territory? How does a territory regarded as peripheral, such as Galicia, relate – beyond its construction as landscape – to other overseas territories to which it has been historically tied? How are landscapes conducive to plunder constructed there too? What role does the ocean play within this network as a living entity that conveys knowledge? How do bodies relate to the territories they inhabit? How can folk wisdom be connected with their territories without being reduced to mere processes of folklorisation?

These questions allow to shift the focus from Galicia to other regions without treating them as equivalents. What matters, precisely, are the relationships, resonances and frictions that emerge between different historical and territorial experiences.

The French philosopher Alain Badiou, in his reflections on Nós (Us) – the collection of forty-nine prints produced by Castelao between 1916 and 1918 – finds precisely this possibility of starting from a specific point to reach something that transcends it: a bond ‘both intimate and universal’ with a real country, ‘a country of a people, and not of a state abstraction’.

From Panama, the historian Marixa Lasso raises similar questions regarding the popular uprising that prevented a Canadian mining company from being granted a concession in 2023. She questions the pollution caused by certain mining activities, the displacement of human beings from the lands where their ancestors were born and died and, in a broader sense, the forms of violence we accept in order to sustain particular economic, social and cultural models.

In 1943, on the island of Martinique, Suzanne Césaire wrote 1943 : le surréalisme et nous (1943: surrealism and us), in which she highlighted surrealism’s capacity to contribute to anticolonial struggles. Against the oppositions imposed by the colonial order – White and Black, European and African, civilised and savage –, she envisaged the possibility of recovering other living sources and other ways of relating. ‘Colonial idiocy’, she wrote, would be purified in the welder’s blue flame.

The image proves particularly fruitful for this project. The flame transforms, but also has the power to unite. Welding involves bringing different materials closer without necessarily erasing their differences. The flame can thus be understood as an image of the relationships we seek to explore: encounters between bodies, territories, memories and forms of knowledge that are capable of producing something that did not exist before.

On the same island, and during those very same years, the French writer Édouard Glissant was developing his thought at the Caribbean margins of surrealism. In opposition to an idea of the world organised around closed identities, he formulated the concept of ‘creolisation’: processes of mixing different cultures and elements whose outcome cannot be known in advance. Unpredictability is crucial here. What emerges from such encounter is not simply the sum of what already existed, but something else.

‘We want to help enrich the world through our difference’. This was an idea that the Galician artist Luis Seoane would convey to his colleague Isaac Díaz Pardo from his exile in Buenos Aires, around 1962. Galicia’s contribution to the world was not to be achieved through assimilation or the renunciation of its identity, but through the possibility of projecting its difference outwards. Far from being an obstacle to relating, this difference would be precisely what made it possible.

The various cases examined here connect with the dynamics that shape the symbolic construction of landscape, revealing how certain institutional narratives are woven from interests that conceal historical conflicts embedded in the territories.

In Galicia, these landscape policies address a wide range of issues, including: environmental activism – from the struggles over communal woodlands to the popular movements Nunca Máis (Never again) and Altri Non (No to Altri) –; labour disputes – from the milk farmers’ protests with tractors against the milk quotas imposed by the European Economic Community to the historic shipping industry strikes in the cities of Vigo and Ferrol; crises in education; abandonment of the countryside and the end of certain forms of self-sufficiency; internal and external migration, but also the one Galicia receives – and the ways in which it does so – ; exile, subalternity and dissents; or phenomena such as drug trafficking in the 1980s and 1990s and the spread of voracious tourism over the past twenty years.

All of this comes into contact with what we call ‘ultramarine’: what belongs to seemingly distant territories that, nevertheless, permeate the history, culture and even the vocabulary of a people for whom flight has become a constant.

‘Iste vaise i aquel vaise / e todos, todos se van (This one leaves and that one leaves, / and everyone, everyone leaves), the Galician writer Rosalía de Castro would write.

Seeking to understand the complexities of a territory we regard as our own and, at the same time, those running through lands we consider foreign may be a way not only of clarifying responsibilities, but also of acknowledging similarities without erasing differences and of taking a stance on that which, however distant it may seem, connects us almost umbilically.

Between these lands lies the ocean. Not merely as a distance or a means of separation, but also as a space of circulation, memory, displacement and connection.

‘Only the ocean is capable of taking from us, and equally returning to us, the vast vision of reality’, writes the Brazilian author Nélida Piñon in The Republic of Dreams, in an attempt to reconcile her Galician ancestry with her native Brazil.

Ángel Calvo

Juan Canela