Archive Territory _ English Texts

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Presentation Rosa María Juárez Fernández President of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia

The Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia is a foundation with a profound commitment to the development of the territory and the transfer of knowledge to society through two courses of action: cultural production and ethnic education. These lines of action are articulated around art in its various current modes in music, the environment, sociology and the economy, among other transversal disciplines. Archive Territory is the work with which the present volume concerns itself, at least in part. This is not just another project, it is part of the roots of the Fundación, in that it palpably expresses the principles of active listening, rigorous research, participation and action in its proper context that we seek to promote as a team. It is difficult to condense into a single support the four years that, with the publication of this book, we will have shared with the people of Cerezales del Condado, Castro del Condado, Devesa de Curueño, Ambasagüas de Curueño, Barrillos de Curueño, Barrio de Nuestra Señora, Lugán and Peñaranda de Bracamonte, with their documents and their stories. We invite you to discover the rest of these supports, which complement each other, to which we have assigned the function of activations: general archive, website, video and audio documentation, maps, filandón get-togethers, open methodologies… You will find references to all of these all through this publication. The domestic conservators, the territories and the collaborating institutions —in particular the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez— that form part of Archive Territory, together with the research team, help the task undertaken by Chus Domínguez hold to its course, and are the bearers of shared knowledge, sensibilities and situations of all kinds and categories, in many cases complex, which we want the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia to be actively involved in. To all of them, thanks for opening wide the doors with your attitude and your work.

The Territory as Source of Inspiration Javier Valbuena Director of the Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez The Fundación Germán Sánchez Ruipérez (FGSR) has launched Archive Territory, a joint project of the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia and the CondadoCurueño district of León, in Tierra de Peñaranda. These two foundations focus their activities on the territory in which they are located and the people who inhabit it. The territory is the inspiration that inevitably leads them to seek to contrast different realities of rural life and to promote a fruitful dialogue between the local and the global. This wish is realized in Archive Territory, which is now being conducted in Peñaranda and posing new challenges for the FGSR’s Centre for Socio-Cultural Development. The project entails examining the family archives of the households of Tierra de Peñaranda, following with bated breath the pointing finger of a domestic conservator attempting to identify the landscape, the street, the house, the neighbourhood or the path in an old black and white photo with a crack in the upper right corner or a suspicious shadow along the lower edge; emulating the movement of his lips as he reads out a barely legible dedication and a date, or recreating the travelling photographer at the country fair, armed with a painted canvas landscape and a papier-mâché horse; listening, with your imagination fully engaged, to the names of each of the friends who went out dancing some Sunday afternoon long ago. It is a matter of forming an archive that combines art with painstaking attention to the way of doing things, to the details, to the surprises that a picture holds in store; of recruiting accomplices willing to share their stories, these personal and communal experiences that are not related to major events, openings or awards, but to everyday life, life in the old days, life now. Life. Of recovering our memory with the stories of those involved, within the framework of an open project that seeks to grow and branch out in Peñaranda, combining art and archive in a process of slow and continuous innovation in which the domestic conservators are the linchpin. Over and above the number of documents that are


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