Earthways
“Earthways” is a network of people, practices and knowledge that contests ecological violence and the politics of abandonment, and was initiated by Marta Lança and Rita Natálio. Learning in depth and in loco about socio-environmental conflicts, alongside integrated practice, calls us to resist extractive abuses and also to exercise care: so as to speculate and fabricate, to build visions and sensory experiences among depleted and exhausted worlds.
Its annual residency programmes enable artists, scientists and activists to come together to address socio-environmental conflicts in specific territorial contexts. The research projects and artistic works that emerge from these programmes are then shared with the public via discussions, performances, experiences, texts, walking tours, etc. The use of artistic processes to study closely the hegemony and monoculture of ecological violence thus becomes a means of nurturing new sensibilities – sensibilities that are both biodiverse and ethically bound to the whirlwind of problems that has come to be known as the Anthropocene. Throughout 2020, “Earthways” proposed an entanglement of various participants from dance, cinema, performance and visual arts; with researchers, cooperatives and activists in the regions of Ourique, Castro Verde, Montemor-o-Novo, Aveiro, Ílhavo and Gafanha da Nazaré, bringing together contributions in different expressions and from different struggles.
These intensive residences aimed to look at specific contexts as a way of thinking and acting at various local, global and multispecific scales. In the Alentejo region, desertification, over-intensive agriculture and the attendant exploitation of migrant labor are discussed, in addition to deactivated and toxic mines, seas of coastal greenhouses, a water and labour drought, species conservation, forms of community resistance and readings of the landscape according to its population. In the Aveiro region we problematize the rapid erosion of the coastline, port traffic, rising sea levels, the disappearance of the estuary, ensuring biodiversity and carbon capture. In November 2020, we shared part of this process in a small programme including auguries and proposals from Ana Rita Teodoro, Joana Levi, Maria Lúcia Cruz Correia, Marta Lança, Rita Natálio, Sílvia das Fadas and Vera Mantero, alongside conversations, labs, and a special issue of the Jornal MAPA publication, at Teatro Municipal São Luiz, during the Alkantara Festival.
In 2021, Rita Natálio organized one more research residence in Lisbon focusing on the city and transit at different scales (center/periphery, rural/urban, national/international, past/future, local/global). The 2021 edition invites choreographer Ana Pi and the visual artist Irineu Destourelles to develop new researchers, and proposed furthers developments of collaborations between Maria Lúcia Cruz Correia & Margarida Mendes, Ana Rita Teodoro & Alina Ruiz Folini, and a performance party by DIDI. The programme for these three days is primarily an invitation to collectivise the experience of historic extinction and environmental grief, while also reclaiming the affective bounds to non-human or other-than-human peoples and beings.
In 2022, Terra Batida launches Escola Refloresta Livre (Free Reforest School), a 3-day programme aimed at sharing research on deforestation and monoculture, regeneration strategies and practices. In an atmosphere of an intimate encounter and a study circle, Escola Refloresta Livre featured the architect Paulo Tavares, who intervenes in different South American forestry contexts with initiatives that question the field of “visual natures” and non-human rights; Helen Torres and Zoy Anastassakis, who approached a few tools of speculative fiction, reading and writing practices, and theories of multi-species anthropology; Paulo Pimenta de Castro, coauthor of the book “Portugal em Chamas – Como Resgatar as Florestas” (2018), and the À Escuta project, an initiative developed in the Serra da Estrela Natural Park and its surroundings by Joana Sá, Luís J Martins, Corinna Lawrenz and Nik Völker. An online training also took place with Geni Núñez, indigenous activist and psychologist who has inspired thought-provoking reflections on the relationships between reforestation and non-monogamy, and who guided the journey “Reflorestamentos afetivos: pistas para descolonização” (“Affective reforestations: clues for decolonization”).
In 2023, the fourth edition of Terra Batida attributes research grants to Alina Ruiz Folini, a choreographer with extensive work in sound research and performance, and Teresa Castro, a researcher and writer who has focused on the connections between cinema and animism, ecocriticism, and plant life forms in visual culture. In partnership with Municipality of Fundão, the artists met with the contexts and agents of the city and surrounding territories to think with and from their environmental challenges, namely the intensive cultivation of eucalyptus and pine forests; the risk of mega-fires; the preservation of knowledge associated with native plants, sensitive medicines and regeneration practices; the new lithium prospection sites in Barco and Alvarrões; and also the deactivated mines of Recheira or those in operation, such as Panasqueira – which carry the history of tungsten and the Second World War, and are still stained by death and contamination. In October, Terra Batida returned to Fundão – the first time the programme premiered its proposals and works-in-process at the residency venue itself –, sharing “Aeromancy” by Alina Ruiz Folini and “Conspiracies” by Teresa Castro. In November, both performances join a workshop by Rita Natálio and the installation and game “E lá no fundo, o que é que tem?” by humusidades for the usual cycle at the Alkantara Festival.
