THE BECOMING OF THE COMMON
Artistic essay on experiences of community management of the landscape
By Luís Costa and Ana Rodríguez

“The mountains have belonged to the serranos since the world was a world, inherited from parents to children. Whoever comes to take it away from us will be with us”.

Aquilino Ribeiro in “When the wolves howl”

Transformations in the rural world, such as the depopulation of many villages and changes in the socio-economic habits of communities, reveal growing tensions between the roles of private, public and community property, within the framework of processes such as mass afforestation, in a context in which the hills have lost some of their functions such as grazing, clearing brush for animal bedding and the use of firewood for domestic use.

Community management in rural territories, the common lands as they are called in Portugal, is as old as the agro-pastoral civilizations themselves, including, in addition to land, the sharing of infrastructures for common use such as mills, ovens, threshing floors, etc., based on access systems established by the communities themselves according to rights assigned to families.

The project “The Becoming of the Common” explores the current meaning of community sharing, based on experiences of revitalizing common land in the Portuguese municipality of Castro Daire, contrasted with other experiences of common use in other areas of Portugal and Uruguay. In the latter country, where private and public land management has predominated, the extent of community management is notoriously residual.

The first phase of the project began in December 2024, with a series of interviews carried out in the civil parish of Gafanhão (Castro Daire), which will be expanded to other territories, with the project including aspects of geographical mapping, collective sessions, document analysis and multidisciplinary reflection, to create a final product that reflects both the validity of the concept of “communitarianism” and the challenges and opportunities it includes.

“O devir do comum” is a project developed in partnership with Mapa sonoro de Uruguay, supported by the Municipality of Castro Daire through the Castro Daire Municipal Library and is also part of the Creative Europe Réseau Tramontana project.

Binaural Nodar is an organization supported by the Portuguese Republic – Culture | Directorate-General for the Arts.