Intertale/Eutopia Stop 14: Nau Côclea, Camallera, Catalunya

This week I spent in an around Camallera, where the lovely and energetic Clara Gari lives. Camallera is a small town with about 800 folks, which thanks to its train station attracts families from all over the region. The school today counts some 500 pupils at its toll. Formerly mainly dependent on agriculture, today the town and surrounding are signified by commuters to nearby Girona and Figueres as well as second homes. Next to a hotel/restaurant you can find here an old fashioned bakery and shop, a bar, a hair dresser and a black smith as many new services such as Pilates classes or a massage salon.

Since 1998 - Clara has established here Nau Côclea, both her home and a home for artists, writers and thinkers. Next to a huge event hall and a studio for a musician, the place hosts a little house where artists can live and think under a big pomegranate tree. Part of the gigantic Catalonian XARXAProd network, Nau Côclea is funded with a small government grant and the collaboration of many artists and friends. Artists are chosen through obligatory Open Panels, which brings its goods and also more problematics to the concept. On the grounds one also finds a tiny wooden hut basking in the sun, where writers and poets are invited for two days to lie on the bed and ad their letters to a hidden book.

But what brings me to Camallera, what I am most interested in, is Clara’s connection to walking art. This, she tells me, rests in her own history of making and showing art. In her distant past she was active in the Barcelona scene, then decided to head for Camallera, where property was more affordable, space more abundant and where she had family connections. She created exhibitions and events and while generally successful, the interaction was increasingly less satisfying for her on all levels: locals, visitors and artists. Following a massive funding crack in 2011 (when 90% was cut) she had a rethink. Increasingly frustrated with traditional participation strategies of exhibitions and workshops she was looking for more convivial, less didactic solutions.  Inspired by a ceramicist artist and friend who in collaboration with other artists, took people into the hills, she saw that people’s attitude changed. Through situating the work in unusual places that have to be walked to, they became part of the work by being audience, artist and judge at the same time. The context of walking the hills changed the perception, very different from the urban form of exhibition and their celebratory vernissages. A new and more convivial, more human way of turning audiences into participants. People, she says, still remember those interactions 20 years later.

And this is how Gran Tour, Clara’s signature project was born. Every year she designs a new route of 30 days, which she and artists walk together. While during the first years they all showed their work along the path, since the pandemic she explores new ways of collaboration that dissolve the idea of authorship and the roles of artists and audiences. Those are now fused in a common artwork related to walking and living together. Researching throughout the year to curate the path, they walk from village to village to see what there is on offer. Food, local crafts people, the minister, the story of a farmer. They are all on the same level. The artists as well as the locals are the audience here, the researchers and walking performers at the same time.

‘I walk, then we are’. Clara Gari

Beyond our time at the Nau Coclea site, Clara and I took the opportunity to meet with others that were concerned by urban forms of showing, experiencing and mediating the work of artists. Triggered by a recent Walking Art conference, which largely was held as successful in terms of numbers and content, we were looking for new and other ways of learning beyond the traditional forms of teaching and lecturing. A great team consisting of Geert Vermeire (moving curator poet and artist), Luce Choules  (Environmental artist and fieldworker) and Pau Cata (Artist/Curator/Researcher) as well as Clara, Nick and myself came together for an intensive, to identify new forms of learning, that go beyond the didactic. Alternative forms of mapping, gaming and collecting were thrown into the bag next to tapas, beers, siestas as well as walking and swimming the Costa Blanca. New and alternative ideas were raised that had their essence of sharing on the move. A new group on the journey was formed, and there is more to come. Watch this space…