Asunción Molinos is from the countryside, and that has marked all her work. She grew up in Guzmán, a small town in the Duero basin (Burgos). All her family is dedicated to agriculture and she is the first to do a university degree. Since she was little, she knew that this way of life was going to disappear: “Coming from a town of 90 inhabitants, being aware of belonging to an interrupted culture, having a very early awareness that this culture is part of a social ecosystem that has the days counted, being surrounded by other towns that were already empty, has situated my work”, she explains in conversation with elDiario.es.
The Reina Sofía buys this year at ARCO the work of artists who are mostly women, Spanish and alive
Further
Born in 1979, Molinos is a researcher and visual artist. Two of his works have just been acquired by two public institutions during the last edition of ARCO: the Ministry of Culture for the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the Madrid City Council for the Museum of Contemporary Art (which exhibits only a small part of his collection at Conde Duque and at the Serrería Belga). An unusual coincidence.
Her work focuses on the contemporary peasantry and is based on the artist’s own origins. “Always, in all family stories and in all conversations, there is talk of those times when there were many more people, those times when there was life in the town, there were two bars, there was a dance, there was this, there was what another, and that that had been extinguished. I immediately understood that it was an unstoppable phenomenon. Having that early awareness of belonging to a culture on the verge of extinction made me worry very soon about what will happen to the ways of doing things that we have, ”she says.
Asunción Molinos Gordo explains that in her town the diversity of crops has diminished enormously and only approved and standardized seeds are grown. In Spain, farmers who want to get out of this situation face many bureaucratic traps in the European Union’s agricultural aid policy. She took the three young farmers who remain in Guzmán to the XIII Havana Biennial (in 2019), an art show that she attended on behalf of Spain, to share experiences with Cuban farmers and how they faced difficulties. of the special period, the economic crisis that the island suffered during the 90s. The artist identifies the way of life of her people with the one shown in the film Alcarras in the Catalan countryside.
Cultivar ideas
Molinos uses ceramics, video, photography or installation to talk about small farmers in countries on the shores of the Mediterranean. “In my work I have always treated farmers as intellectuals, as producers of knowledge, not only as producers of potatoes, cereals or legumes, but as producers of ideas. What was clear to me was that there will always be ways to produce food, but the ways of life and all the production of knowledge associated with it are in danger. The ways in which we relate to the landscape, with the territory, with our own neighbors and with the economy, the way in which money is understood in towns, or something quite particular: the idea of family, which is different in towns than in cities. I immediately realized that all this has a lot of value and that it is undervalued and stigmatized ”, he maintains.
At the age of 16, she went to live in Madrid and there she became “the small-town girl”: “Suddenly I was the one that nobody takes seriously because I have a specific accent or because I speak using certain localisms or idioms, and I had to be in a fight . I thought that we have a treasure on a cultural level but the outside world thinks that ours is useless, obsolete, outdated and that the best thing that can happen with agricultural cultures is that they become extinct, so that we can really move on to that super-advanced modernity where everything is based on technology and digitization”, analyzes Molinos.
With the desire to share the richness of peasant culture, and remove it from a marginal place, the artist has created works that reflect on the use of the land, nomadic architecture, peasant strikes, the transformation of rural work, the biotechnology or international trade in food.
In her research process, the artist went to live in Egypt in 2010, to meet one of the oldest agricultural societies in the world. “The Egyptians have been farming for 5,000 years, if not more. There I found a lot of ways of working and thinking that were somehow similar to Guzmán’s way of doing things, except for the differences. We shared neither religion nor language nor modes of production nor forms of economy, we were all of mixed origins, but what we did share was an identity linked to agricultural activity. The fact of being farmers brought an identity associated with that”.
Molinos took his father to Egypt as part of an investigation. “We were meeting with some farmers from a small town in Luxor. My father and they understood each other immediately, very well, despite the fact that he did not speak Arabic and they did not speak Spanish. They did it with gestures, touching the ground, going to places, pointing to things. They understood each other at a higher level, I think any anthropologist would be jealous of the complicity that was established between them”, explains Molinos, who considers herself more of a researcher than an artist and uses tools from anthropology, sociology or cultural studies in her work.
He continued to live in Cairo until the outbreak of the Arab Spring in 2012. He later traveled to Palestine, Jordan, Turkey, Ecuador, and Mexico, revisiting those connections. “From there I began to work on this idea of peasant thought, which is the main axis of my practice. That production of ideas that is linked to peasant communities and that is somehow common, regardless of whether we are separated by oceans, mountains, IMF debts, or geographical and political barriers.” And it is in rural culture where Molinos finds breaks with a “fierce capitalism”: “There is a way of inhabiting the world that is very responsible and that has to do with the idea of perpetuating life, of making sure that the practices that are carry out the guarantee. For example, there are farmers who are planting trees and they will never harvest their fruits or their wood, but they are leaving them for the next generation. It is an intergenerational responsibility with respect to the territory”.
bacteria that help each other
The work that the Madrid City Council has acquired is entitled Quorum Sensing, a small blown glass sculpture that is part of an investigation that the artist did on the fecal waters of the city of Dubai. Together with the biologist Ruqaiyyah Siddiqui, she analyzed what the social life of bacteria is like when they leave human bodies and arrive at a wastewater treatment plant. “The bacteria that leave our bodies are highly diverse, I wanted to see how they manage to survive. We saw that the most common behavior pattern was that of mutualism: thanks to providing mutual help, the bacteria managed to perpetuate their lives. What was fascinating about the project was seeing how such primitive life forms had come to that kind of conclusion a long time ago. And we, who call ourselves evolved and the intelligent being of creation, have not yet drawn that conclusion, ”she reflects.
This work is linked to another larger project, In transit (Botany of a trip), that combines art, science and ecology, and with which Molinos has created a garden from seeds that survive human intestinal transit, such as tomato or aubergine, which cannot be broken down by digestive enzymes, so they are excreted intact and are still capable of germination. “Together with the Dubai Wastewater Treatment Plant team, I collected two cubic meters of human faeces. We took them to a greenhouse and began to pour water. Many plants that were contained in the feces germinated. Crazy. Amaranth appeared, many types of chilies, tomatoes, pumpkins, mustard… countless crops. We made a selection of the plants and took them to exhibit at Art Jameel in Dubai, an art center that invited me to do the garden”.
The choice of Dubai was not accidental. At that time, before the pandemic, the city’s airport was the busiest in the world, a bridge between the East and West of the planet. In addition, 85% of its population is international, with which an important part of global culinary habits is represented in the city, and all these foods make the same trip from the plate to the gray water treatment plants of the city. city, with which diversity is assured.
“All the international passengers who came from all over the globe at that time and had the need to use the bathroom, left a very diverse collection of their geography deposited in their feces. From the seediest place comes that kind of sublime beauty. That is why it was important that the piece Whose Semsing was extremely beautiful. She needed to create things that were close to jewelry, the pieces are made with blown glass in a Cairo workshop with Yasser, a traditional blower who recycles the city’s bottles to work with glass. The sculpture is a kind of jewel, treasure or precious stone, because now the intestinal microbiota is on the rise. There are people who are already stool donors because they have super-healthy intestines with important microbacterial colonies and other intestines can be regenerated through the introduction, for example, of a suppository made from that other person’s stool”, explains Molinos.
The injustice of water
For its part, the piece that the Museo Reina Sofía has purchased is a ceramic sculpture-totem that forms part of a project called How much river up there! around water pottery ceramics and which could be seen exhibited in the Travesía Cuatro gallery in Madrid, in 2021. “It began with an investigation in the Valencian orchard on irrigation canal systems, in which I saw how communities Muslim peasant women who settled in the Vega del Turia at that time were very clear that they could not fight for water, they could not lose resources and they created a super-equitable water distribution system”, explains the artist.
When he began to investigate water pottery, he discovered that both the pottery and peasant communities were obsessed with being efficient in the equitable distribution of water. “All the quarries, sewers, jugs or bridal jugs that they create are highly efficient in that the water reaches all the places,” he explains. Molinos studies and compares the X and XI periods with the end of the XX, when water was listed on the stock market. “For me that is a shock at many levels, but especially at the technological level. In the 11th century, a part of the technology in peasant communities was being put at the service of guaranteeing continuous and safe access, there is a very strong idea of water justice, whereas now, in the times in which we find ourselves, with All that sophisticated technology that we have, the financial markets are precisely against access and in favor of privatization, regulation and disproportionate and inequitable control of water”, he points out.