Audiovisual installation

Stefan Laxness is a spatial researcher concerned with our collective responsibility to transition our fossil fuelled economies. In his latest production, he explored the consequences that large-scale environmental restoration might have on how we live and occupy our territories.

In the absence of a comprehensive participatory spatial project when discussing environmental restoration, Laxness turns his attention to the Galician “communal forest’’ or montes vecinales en mano común. The montes vecinales are small, traditionally autonomous, parishes which in recent years have used collective decisionmaking to restore the diversity of their forest.
In collaboration with Fundación RIA and the Barbanza Ecosocial Lab, Stefan Laxness deployed open-source environmental sensing techniques to register and engage with processes of land abandonment and depopulation and reflect on the consequences of a collective project of environmental restoration. Learning from the montes vecinales, Stefan Laxness posits that a network of territorial commons could become a key framework for tackling these ongoing processes compounded by climate stresses which threaten to intensify the societal and ecological decline of large parts of Spain and Europe’s territory. This work has been produced through a
residence in LABoral Centro de Arte.