Site. Permacultures of death

May-December 2023 Planta Baja (Madrid)

Resting in the riverbed are the bodies of mammoths and humans who were and are not and who in their own way continue to be. And in the enveloped mud they decompose, seemingly equal in their fossil evolution. So different and so equal, they sediment in strata. To those who listen, these recompositions speak of our return to the soil (we like soil better in English), of earthly forms of life and of the capitalist eagerness to separate us from the earth. A hurried society can no more stop to look at a cemetery than it can be in solidarity with its dead.

Site. Permacultures of death is an artistic investigation situated around the neighborhood of San Isidro and a group of cultural agents that proposes to rethink the ways of relating to death in our societies of performance. From an ecosocial poetics, this research rearticulates apparently unconnected contexts: the cemetery of San Isidro, monumental cemetery expelled from the historical center and later surrounded by the developmental urbanism of Carabanchel; the archaeological site of San Isidro, which among the mud of the Manzanares treasures the origins of Madrid; the figure of San Isidro as peasant, dowser, healer and paradoxical uncorrupted mummy.

Site is organized around two moments of intensity: in May, a time of collective deep mapping in which to recompose together the life-death-resto plots of this river territory, and an open program in November in which to socialize and activate part of the learnings of the research.

Site is a collaborative project between the creative space Planta Baja and the landscape artist Malú Cayetano, the farmer-thanadoula Louis Ferment and the artist Esther Rodríguez-Barbero, which in turn will seek to overflow and connect with various neighborhood agents and/or traversed by the permacultures of dying.