The Red Land a photographic project by Aitor Estévez Olaizola

The Red Land

The local has long responded to global cultural and economic processes. The countryside has been historically linked to the city, to the urbanization and market dynamics that, as a result of industrialization, have radically transformed rural societies and their environment in recent times. However, in today's global society, places are shaped by interdependence relationships with other places and may consider that the radical sense of place is complemented by flows apparently alien to it.

In the green language, Raymond Williams (2001)⁽¹⁾ has already explained how in any place, throughout the world, the agrarian confidence was challenged by the feelings of loss, melancholy and regret. However, he explains how an alternative principle of trust in nature itself and in relation to the human community was developed during the eighteenth century. In this sense, the emotional fluctuation as a result of both perceptions of reality would form a new unit that, according to the author, would sink its roots into a rather long sentimental story.

In the current context dominated by ecological discourse, the photographic project that we present here pays attention to the emotional dimension that red represents. At the midpoint of the Segarra plateau, where intensive cereal agriculture and the agri-food industry have become hegemonic, the small village of Tarroja becomes a metaphor for some lost sensitivity. Lately, since the Green Revolution, the countercultural spirits, the new cultural imagery close to Eastern spirituality and agro-ecology have led to the need to separate and expand.

All in all, the genius loci coexists with a humanity long disengaged from nature. Today's cultural hybrids respond to a heterogeneity of cultural imagery that, between a modernity yet to be realized and nostalgia for the past, confronts the idealization of an unknown paganism. Men and their gadgets have long encouraged each other and in this way they landscapefully encourage the land that barely supports them.

Green, complementary to red, would have hidden its meaning due to its dominance. However, at night, the red spirit stands out and envelops everything that, during the day, is dazzled and veiled by the sun: the water of the Sió river, the trench of a railway that never existed, the old road of the abandoned town of Tudela on the hill where the hermitage of Saint Michael still resists, the telluric force emanating from the stony headlands of the region and the cavities that they hide, the dry stone walls of so many rural constructions, the layout of the ritual dances performed by a group new age on the hill of the "house of the hunters" or, next to the inhabited nucleus, the roofs and the fountain beside the old road to Cervera.