mobile method
mobile method proposes an educational itinerary and a collective activation effort between resisting rural communities, cultural producers, and the territory.
As new social and artistic intervention format inland develops mobile method. It places a group of artists and specialist of different fields, students and guest contributors, in various rural contexts, beginning with Vega de Granada, to engage in collective activation efforts involving rural communities, cultural producers, and the surrounding territory. Going forward, mobile method will also function as an itinerant pedagogical body, landing in regions in which the local commons are most disputed.
Scaled to the size of the regional county in question, mobile method will experiment with the idea of ‘learning by doing’ in an open ended process, as a form of reciprocal learning between artists and a local population, with regards to their environment and transformative social processes.
In each region, mobile method initiates a period of intensive attention and intervention where a series of actions or social tools are carried out in collaboration between the visiting agents and locals. These actions will range from visualizations of local knowledge and cartography, to (re)examining the idea of the ‘art exhibit’, to organizing discussions that knit together the legacy, and current manifestation, of rural culture together with critical theory and contemporary art.
Art is increasingly a disputed space in which notions of utility, collaboration, social change, ecology and non-anthropocentric views are surfacing. mobile method supports this vision for the arts by incorporating revised historical socio-cultural antecedents, from the early 20th-century Spanish Regenerationism and European Krausism, to innovative actions such as the Educational Missions (part of a series of progressive initiatives of the 2nd Spanish Republic [1932–36]). From there, mobile method aims to facillitate alternative narratives and possible futures for these regions.
Since its inception in 2009, inland has served as a platform for collaboration, theoretical construction and experimental application of transformative cultural strategies, working in more than 22 villages, publishing, organising public events and exhibitions internationally. Today it proposes mobile method as a form of intervention in specific socio-ecological contexts. inland itself draws from a diversity of sources, these range from the Free Teaching Institution to the emancipated Latin-American, peasant-mestizo and indigenous pedagogies, as well as from the fields of Social Ecology and Agroecology.
mobile method makes, through collective action, encounters between art, agriculture and territory to happen a possible communion of basic and elevated needs, of tangible, material and body operations and transcendence, of functional and symbolical potentials. It aims to simultaneously create new expressions of rural culture and a reformulation of ‘art’. It proposes the application of art practice to the construction of spaces for ‘good life’, environmental consciousness, local empowerment and direct democracy in the countryside. ‘Countryside’ is taken here be a place where relationships and management of natural resources might occur according to a logic different from that of capital. mobile method expresses a concern stemming from the current rural social movements, and the peasant culture of resistance and autonomy, with which it engages, and also plans to build upon those movements. It uses alternative pedagogies as a fundamental process to examine and reimagine a multiplicity of possible ‘countrysides’ and rural cultures, and to re-think the locus of art itself.
mobile method will begin its itinerary in the Vega de Granada (the meadows, villages and gardens surrounding the city of Granada). Restoring a former Federico García Lorca’s country house that has been uninhabited and forgotten for decades as its base, a group of 10 cultural agents will start an intense period of study and co-production with the local community. These 10 ‘agents’ are young artists and students of other disciplines (such as Sociology or Agronomy) chosen by inland after an open call. They will work alongside visiting guest contributors as well as neighbors of all kind, from veteran farmers to teenagers and school children. Local community actors will be especially important for their long-term engagement with their territory, and their defense of the Vega in light of threats of destruction and land speculation.
mobile method proposes the development of 6 different tools: Cartography; Editing and Reading; Mobile Museum; Portable Kitchen; Peasant Theater and Extended Parliament. Each will be nourished by the contributions of experts invited in to mentor the group. These actions are geared towards a shared investigation and dynamisation of new cultural forms, in order both to forge a new identity for ‘the collective’ and to uncover emancipating alliances between rural and urban environments.
Organized by: CA – inland.org
Sponsor: Centro Federico García Lorca
Partners: Fundación Francisco Giner de los Ríos, Residencia de Estudiantes, Plataforma Rural, Plataforma Salvemos la Vega, ISEC, UNIA, facultad de Bellas Artes UCM, facultad de Bellas Artes EHU, facultad de Bellas Artes UPV, facultad de Bellas Artes UGR, Andalucía Directo S.L., Ayuntamientos de la Vega de Granada.
inland team for mobile method: Concept and formulation Fernando García Dory, Research and background documentation Lara García Díaz, Coordination Miguel Cerezales Rotaeche.