the photos so far….

What day is it ? Monday ? Did we just start today ? Feels like longer…must be tuesday. Hm…

Woke up just before sunrise on the distant horizon beyond the poligon industrial located 1k east from here, the industrial strip outside of valls. It’s close and I actually wonder how much their energies and activities sync to ours during this week or the ecofarm pipirimosa in general, from a sustainability/ footprint perspective.

Maybe I manage to cruise the strip, you know, with an L.A. sunset strip attitude, around sunset, just to get a feel when things are quiet…enjoy the artificial lights, beautiful, and maybe even partly powered by fairly local wind generated energy…Lunchtime soon…will write in compressed style…my wife got 6h of sleep tonight, no milk requests by Leanne during whole night, great, did charge here batteries to a good enough level.

Leanne was not so happy in the baby carrying towel with me this morning while preparing mint, sage, rosmarin thyme tea in the kitchen….though she liked collecting the herbs outside in the fruit tree orchard. I think she has a trees moving in the wind fetish…stares at them with eyes wide open, impressed and amazed…I really love to be close to her and observe how she percieves and reacts to the environment….otherwise shes happy which feeds back to me of course. Oops, not so compressed writing anymore.

Ayla: Stimulating environment, so many things laying around everywhere, metal wood broken stuff to be repaired or permaculturally used one of these days. Me: must manage energies, very nice interessting workshop this morning about presence, trust…found a pair of house shoes in the free shop, have to repair and wear. Cleaned main compost toilet, people using it more and more correctly..nice weather…cut

Day one at Growing Nowhere started slowly, but it has been a good thing. Not all of us were on site this morning, so we decided to take it easy and wait for everybody to be here at Can Pipirimosca (with the exception of Toby who will arrive on Thursday, and Simon coming in tomorrow).

In the meantime, we had some good times getting to know each other a little bit better, and discovering the biofarm and some basics of permaculture. We also had a fun moment before lunch when each of us did a drawing of the “how I got here” history. Fun. Cara filmed it for our Fiming Growing Nowhere documentary project and I did some background shooting with my small camera – don’t know yet if my content will end up in the final documentary editing, but you can bet I will manage to put some of the videos online.

Cara also run in the afternoon a cool workshop where we asked ourselves individually and collectively why the hell we are here – kidding, the investigation was about inspiration and we ended up with THE question that sums up all our individual ones, which is: “how can we learn to balance our inspiration to grow Nowhere, our art and our community in a sustainable way?” – or something like this, I don’t remember as we came out with a number of variations of the same question. More about it in the next days, as we progress through the workshop.

I haven’t set up my 6am Needle in the Hay Stack Project, of which I will talk in a separate blog post – basically, the barn where I am supposed to work is full of stuff of any sort, so I will have to clean it all before even thinking of setting up some art piece in there. I’ll tell you more about it soon.

Stay tuned with our blog also because we scheduled for tomorrow the first Blogging Growing Nowhere workshop, where I will train all artist and participants of our art retreat on how to use Wordpress and how to blog – so we are going to have plenty of new bloggers soon!

Love from Can Pipirimosca – Massimo

We are all very excited about the Growing Nowhere retreat, happening in a few weeks at Ca Pipirimosca, a biofarm near Valls (Reus, Catalunya, Spain), from November 9 to November 15 (for your local knowledge, biofarm is biogranja in spanish). All the info about the Growing Nowhere artist retreat in Reus are available at the website http://www.GrowingNowhere.org.

This is the Growing Nowhere blog used by all artists, organizers, host and participants to the Growing Nowhere retreat to keep track of all the growing and evolving art, community and personal experiences developed all along the retreat… and beyond! Let’s blog all together! =)

Check out the Google Map below to get directions to Can Pipirimosca, so you don’t get lost getting on site – access is tricky and the first time I went I ended up asking the local police to escort me there after driving around like crazy for almost 2 hours! =( Zoom in on a satellite mode to explore the venue in advance! =)

Don’t forget to visit also the Nowhere site at http://www.GoingNowhere.org Participate and stay tuned with us and the Growing Nowhere blog!