Here is the mini-documentary that captures a bit of the place, the people, the projects, the community and the spirit of the Growing Nowhere retreat in Catalunya. Enjoy the view!

The last night of Growing Nowhere… Here I am on the farm listening to our host playing an instrument I can’t name. It’s beautiful. We celebrated three birthdays and a band played.

A lot of visitors came around this evening to join us for a party and see what we’ve created this week. Many of them are Spanish, but I also met a Polish girl, a Belgian woman, a French man, and several others.

It’s an interesting step to take, from creating art within our small group to displaying it to people we don’t know. It makes you take a step back and consider how to explain what you’ve been doing to someone who might know nothing about it, or might not even speak your language. It’s an important step in the creative process, and one that takes a bit of courage I think. I hope our visitors have enjoyed themselves here tonight.

I am surprised that the projects I have watched forming over the course of the week seem so fresh to me tonight. After all the finishing touches and connecting the dots, they really have come together. It’s possible to watch every component be created and still be struck by the finished product. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I feel like that statement could apply to us and our group as well.

I am sad to think about leaving tomorrow. It took me time to hit my stride here, and now that I have it’s time to go. But I will take so much with me – not only the jumpstart to my creativity and food for thought about my own process and challenges, but more importantly the connections I have made with people. It’s connections and collaborations that give me the most inspiration.

An interesting experiment: a group of people, connected through Nowhere coming together for one week with somewhat vague notions of art, community and sustainability and exploring throughout our time together what these concepts mean to us and what Ǵrowing Nowhere’ really is.

Using the Nowhere (non-related… just a nice little burst of synchronicity) book that Cara brought on tapping into and exploring creativity we decided that if we had a question that epitomizes our quest for this week it was:

” How can we inspire and realize creativity in a balanced and sustainable way in ourselves, our group and the wider community?”

I like how all these things that are arising in us as a group, things to do with our purpose here are things that I have felt very drawn to and been exploring myself in recent months. Makes me think about things like collective consciousness. Makes me happy.

…………..time lapse of several hours……………………

Wow. I just gave a tour in Spanish to a few local girls. One of them breeds chickens that are a specific breed to this area. I hate, hate, hate being on camera and leading things like that but in a way I can kind of do it and I feel grateful to be pushed into it. Tis a good thing to have ones confidence in oneself increased.

What else?

Been thinking about the differences between creativity here and at Nowhere… Nowhere, being a desert like Black Rock in Nevada is like a blank canvas where we have to build or create something from scratch. We are in a way somewhat detached from our environment – and it often feels like there is a battle there too – against the heat, the dust, the mosquitoes etc. Here at Pipirimosca however we can wonder around the farm, explore the heaps of junk, climb trees, and find ourselves with all these ways to interact with and engage with our environment. New ideas arise, spontaneous inspirations, collaborations  unfold and gradually manifest…

…so I felt somewhat sad this week that I had a such a concrete idea for my project and it involved using materials I had brought with me and not really interacting with people or the outside world… a pretty familiar feeling for me. Watching everyone around me engaging with the outside world and all the creativity and spontaneity really heightened my awareness of  being closed and being trapped in my own little world. I had many moments of feeling very sad over the past week because of this.

So what  a beautiful end to the week to be able to participate in a sweat lodge with my two moon sisters (Fuck, this is so cringeworthy writing this but damn it they are moon sisters), which was Tessaś project and use the transformative power of fire and heat, of connecting with female friends and energy to fuel intentions for change.  We sat for hours in our little cocoon, or womb as it began to feel like while Chris and our French friends tended the fire and gave us more hot bricks when we asked. Naked, dripping in sweat, sitting on the bare earth, slowly getting more and more filthy and primal and hot and reveling in it. It was the most beautiful and raw and funny and intimate and transformative experience.

And so today is different. I am collecting things from people, exploring materials that are around here and making a patch for the  quilt with memories from this week… I got Massimo to destroy some fabric I found with his angle grinder and then tried to get the dog to chew it but it looked up at me with a docile expression and ignored my demonstration… Oli used the ink he was drawing with to write something on some denim I found and also donated a button. Thereś fabric from Alannaś tentacle creations and Coco, one of the French guys wwoofing here just gave me something too…

I find myself volunteering to organize the greeters this evening at our event/party thing so it appears that today, my last day, is all about exploring and engaging with the outside world. Which dear reader, makes a very happy Ruby indeed.

Yesterday I went with Pere from Can Pipirimosca to the hardware store and to the dump for recycling material, so I took advantage of the time with him to learn about permaculture. Check out the video here below, with Pere telling us about permaculture – in spanish!

Basically, as Pere said, permaculture is a technique aimed to design and create self-sufficient spaces where to live in harmony with nature. The philosophy behind permaculture is to “work with” instead of “working against“, helping nature closing its cycles.

The difference between organic farming and permaculture is that permaculture cares about the impact on the environment, promoting also the balance between man and animals, insects and more biodiversity. Another focus of permaculture is also the attention to re-use resources that, if not used, will contaminate the environment, minimizing the global impact through local action.

Thanks Pere! Not only for telling us about permaculture, but also for hosting Growing Nowhere at Pipirimosca!

the photos so far….

This week we are all eating a large amount of (organically grown) vegetables. This is a very healthy diet, though a bit of a shock to systems more attuned to things than come in tins or under clear plastic covers that have to be pierced three times with a fork.

I did hear one of my compatriots say something along the lines that he does like a bit of roughage; and the compost toilets are (currently) coping admirably. Everyone is going well at Growing Nowhere.

I came to Growing Nowhere after several weeks on the road around Europe, feeling nomadic and a bit up in the air. I came with no materials, no expectations, and no idea what I was getting myself into. I had in mind my project for London Decompression, a jellyfish/octopus mythical creature called Cephadaria.

Easier drawn than built...

To be honest, I had no idea what I was doing. When I sat down and actually started planning out the construction of the creature, the more I thought about it the more impossible it seemed. What had I gotten myself into? Why had I volunteered for all this stress? There were moments when I really considered giving up.

The most intimidating thing is a blank canvas or a blank sheet of paper. The sheer vastness of possibilities can overwhelm you. But here at Growing Nowhere, I am surrounded by creative people who take all different approaches. Once I actually got my hands dirty, it started to take shape. I made important discoveries about what worked and what didn’t, and adjusted the plan accordingly. Once I had some clarity, I also found support from the community here and people stepped up to take on specific aspects of the project they were drawn to.

Now I feel incredibly optimistic. The project has morphed somewhat from what I originally conceived, but I think it’s for the better. Trial and error forced me to figure out what aspects were essential to the concept for me, and what could be adjusted.The essence is still there, and in the current form is even more pure.

We did an interesting exercise today plotting our creative flow and mindset over the course of the week on a graph. Mine went down, down, down until the breakthrough moment when I hit a very low place, then shot up to a euphoric high. It occurred to me that the space between those highs and lows is potent potential energy for creativity, and I need to embrace the cycle as part of the creative process, not be afraid of it. I needed to dive in to come out the other side. And once I did, I looked around and found wonderful piles of materials, ideas, and sunshine, and everything seems possible.

Greetings comrades, from Big RoN.

Following the failure of the original Growing Nowhere organisation to maintain order, an atmosphere of louche decadence was fomented by subversive creatives whose values were not in accordance with the aims of the project.

The Repùblic of Nowhere (RoN) has therefore been declared, by forces loyal to the original aims of the project. Due to provocations by those who would seek to undermine its success, a perimeter has been established to protect all the artists from this external threat.

All members of the collective were successfully inducted this evening, and are as one in the artistic struggle for a glorious future in the Republic of Nowhere. All have agreed to quadruple their artistic output to meet quotas.

Worker artists were also taken to the shopping mall, where all the latest consumer durables are on show; then to the industrial sites where the new nation will be built; and finally they were taken to the border area to see the barrier which protects them from unhealthy outside influences.

A small number of individuals who attempted to assert their own selfish private agendas were re-educated and learned the error of their ways. They are sorry for their thought crimes and were re-assimilated (under surveillance, naturally) to RoN society where they joined in the anthem with the other workers:
“We do RoN, RoN; and we do RoN RoN”.

And so, through shared values of Unity, Strength and Power, we will build an artistic utopia that will last a thousand years*

Communique ends

* or till Sunday, at least

It’s Thursday today and we had a great breakfast together. A really good way to start the day and people got right into their projects. Bit of a power problem, but apart from that all seamless.  Power as in electricity not people.

We had a storytelling session last night. I recorded everyone telling a story from their life, a book, childhood, whatever they wished. That was really lovely and the diverse nature of the content and styles was unbelievable. A little insight into the inner workings of people, or a bit of fun. It was all recorded and now I need to figure out how to edit it a little. So watch this space for some storytelling history…

Now all i need is a few cd’s so everyone can take this little memory away..

The 6am Needle in the Hay Stack Project has been a failure – I started the sound system at 6am and some people came down at 6.30am totally pissed off because of the loud music – although it was mostly ambient electronica until then and (almost) no beats. Sad – after all the work I did I have been forced to shut the project down barely half an hour after I started the first session.

A long discussion followed for pretty much for the rest of the day, where I tried to explain not only that art is not meant to please but also to provoke, and the provocation I wanted to achieve was indeed a wake up call to come enjoy and celebrate the birth of the day – but whatever….

Just before lunchtime I preferred to cut the polemics and just be on my own for the rest of the day. As a matter of fact I enjoyed getting one of Pere’s bikes for a ride into town, where I finally had a bocadillo de jamon after all the veggie food of the last days (good stuff, but I’m carnivore and I was craving jamon). I also bought some chorizo that I will share with everybody over the next few days and I truly enjoyed a little bike ride in the countryside, and to chill in the sun on a solitary field full of little white flowers and bees doing their job who respectfully left me alone. Then I spent the rest of the day sleeping in the barn and trying to figure out what to do.

I’m no sure if this is really the place where I can experiment my art, and not sure if this is the right community to develop art project with. So today I also bought 40 pairs of earplugs at the local hardware store, thinking that by providing earplugs for those who want to keep sleeping I would have more chance to run the project. But I finally decided that the best thing to do is to tear it all down tonight.

I’m sure nobody will really notice during the day, as the LEDs in the hay are not visible in the daylight – somebody will notice their absence only at end of the day, but of course everybody will notice the absence of sound tomorrow morning. Or maybe not, since everybody will be wearing earplugs. Whatever… anyway, I will find a way to reuse the material (of course) and to do something else. And I can’t wait for Toby to come in tomorrow so we can start working on the Singing Tree Project!