Land Commons

Project description

Working together: Concomitentes and Montes de Couso community

Concomitentes has convened many projects at the intersections of art, ecology and sustainable governance. For example, Solar Narratives explored sustainable ecological transitions in the rural areas of León. In January 2023 they organised a public event – Lessons from Mutualisms – sharing learnings from past projects, particularly the role of solidarity and reciprocity in collective practice. Xosé Antón Araúxo, a member of the Montes de Couso community, was invited to the event as an opportunity to formally meet the Concomitentes team and their work, ahead of the ALILASUS launch. Since 1984, Xosé Antón has been on the management committee of Montes de Couso, an active community of 84 people who manage 330 hectares of communal woodland.

The Concomitentes co-ordinator, Fran Quiroga, and cultural mediator, Natalia Balseiro, first visited Couso in February 2023. Over many hours, Xosé Antón guided them on a walk through the community woodland so they could begin to know the landscape and pre-existing community-run projects. He shared their ambitious goal: to become a self-sufficient community.

Mediation process

In late March 2023, the Montes de Couso mediation process began. Although ‘mediation’ is associated with conflict resolution, Concomitentes use the term to describe the facilitation of community co-creation. On a wet and windy early spring day, members of the Couso community gathered in Couso Neighbourhood Centre with mediator Natalia Balseiro and the Concomitentes co-ordinator, Fran Quiroga. The process began with a dialogue circle, in which all attendees responded to a series of questions, trying to reflect and find a common desire for the future of the Couso Woodland. The community developed a shared vision for the woodlands to remain communal in the future, with an intergenerational knowledge transfer so young people are aware of what the woodlands community can achieve. These dreams were written down and read aloud at subsequent meetings.

Other methods of participation, guided by Balseiro, included group walks through the communal woodland, guided tours of pre-existing community projects and the ‘world cafe’ method of group discussions. Through this mediation process of monthly gatherings – of dancing, of listening to music, of sharing meals, of writing dreams – Balseiro built a trusting relationship with the community. There was a group of 8-10 community members who participated in every stage of the two-year project. This group grew and varied according to the different phases of the project.

‘We try, especially at the beginning, to maintain a cadence, a rhythm, like in dance. A series of regular, monthly meetings on Thursday afternoons follow one another in a choreographed fashion; when the rhythm is broken, participation changes.’
Natalia Balseiro, mediator

By October 2023 the seeds of an artistic commission emerged from the Couso community: to complete the pre-existing Bosque da Lingua / Forest of Language project, aimed at preserving the eco-social heritage of their native language of Galician. One of the main challenges for the Concomitentes team was to encourage the community to think beyond this pre-existing idea, which already had designated resources, and to consider more dynamic ways to bring their heritage into future visions of the woodland.

Although the Bosque da Lingua project aimed to conserve intangible heritage, the Couso community realised that for heritage to stay relevant it must be re-enacted, re-imagined and given the space to co-evolve. From this understanding, a second idea emerged: a performance in which the memories, the present and the imagined future of Montes de Couso were recorded.

In total, 10 sessions were held in which Balseiro aimed to get to know the community, discover their common goals, imagine the woodland in the future, provide the Couso community with creative communication tools and explore legal protection of their intangible heritage.

Artistic co-creation

After a year of participatory and mediation work, the contemporary artist Asunción Molinos Gordo was commissioned to develop a creative process that responded to the community’s desire for intergenerational land management. In December 2023, she was introduced to the community at a celebratory event to mark this new phase of the project: ‘Communal Mountains: how much of the past is in the future’ (PDF 15.6MB).

Molinos Gordo returned to Montes de Couso in February 2024 for a period of deep listening to the community’s wishes. Asunción guided a six-hour workshop with people who were involved in the year-long mediation process. Alongside informal meetings with community members at a beloved local restaurant, Molinos Gordo also organised individual interviews, both face-to-face and online, to get to know the community members and specialists who contributed to her artistic research process.

In October 2024, after months of the creative participatory process, Molinos Gordo and all 84 members of the Montes de Couso community co-designed a ritual festival, ‘Os sentires do monte’. The day consisted of a journey through the communal woodland, with several stops at important places where Molinos Gordo co-ordinated 11 site-specific and multisensory creative interventions. The ritual started with a call to the mountain, made by elders using conch shell horns. The conch is a traditional way of communicating across the mountain. One ritual involved the sharing of foraged herbal teas. Another was a performance where three of the youngest community members rode horses and guided the community to the ancient burial mounds of the mountain. Alicia Ruiz described ‘everything [in the ritual] as an action to thank the woodland and to value the different heritage that is in this forest’. The final component of the ritual was a reading of the ‘Mountain Self-Protection Plan’, a text enshrining the rights of the mountain, co-created by the community and artist.

The community will repeat and self-manage the ritual festival annually, following a protocol (written in Galician) documenting past actions and key contacts. The protocol recognises the need to keep the ritual alive, while adapting it to emergent community needs.

‘The community feels more secure for their future. Having the rituals and having the letter of rights of the forest, they feel empowered to confront future problems that they may have, and that they have tools to defend themselves and their territory’
Alicia Ruiz, Concomitentes Cultural Manager

In September 2025, the community independently organised and delivered the festival.

Sustainability issues

Commons

There are 2,800 woodland commons in Galicia currently, managing 670,000 hectares of land. This equates to a third of the region’s woodland and almost a quarter of the area of Galicia. These commons are based on a kind of ownership that is both private and collective: they are jointly owned by a community of residents who have sovereignty over the use of the land in the area where they live. Historically in Galicia, woodlands communities have played an important role in safeguarding tangible and intangible natural heritage.

The Montes de Couso community’s holistic land management has been recognised by the United Nations ICCA Registry, a global registry of territories and areas that are self-identified and conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities. With their international recognition, the community was an ideal collaborator with whom to consider the role of art and creative processes in managing commons.

The theme of commons was woven throughout the project:

• In May 2023, there was a guided ‘Commons Walk’ through Montes de Couso. During the tour, local leaders and experts shared details about the history and community management of the woodland.
• Halfway through the project in December 2023, ‘Communal Mountains: how much past there is in the future’ delved into communal land management models through an ecofeminist lens. The event ended with music and dance.
• Mediator Natalia Balseiro described that the project ‘opened up channels of close collaboration with other forest communities, transferring the knowledge acquired in the process to these communities, bringing the contagion effect into play’.

Rights of Nature

‘The Couso woodland community is part of the internalised heritage of the individuals who make it up: the community members have a kinship relationship with the woodland. It is an ancestral relationship of radical intimacy, they know that for a long time their lives were interdependent and that they could not be one without the other. The intention of this project is to contribute to the underpinning of what already exists, to participate in the art of keeping the community alive and to help its continuity, so that its spirit may be inherited by future generations’
Asunción Molinos Gordo, artist

In their first meeting with mediator Natalia Balseiro, the Couso community proposed recognising the woodland as a living entity within a legal framework. This idea gained traction throughout the mediation process and became a central tenet of Molinos Gordo’s commission.

In February 2025, the online event ‘Normative Imagination for the Rights of Nature’ brought together artist Asunción Molinos Gordo, community leader Xosé Antón Araúxo, researcher Carlos Andrés Baquero Díaz and mediator Natalia Balseiro. The session explored legal frameworks that grant personhood to nature, such as rivers and lagoons. The event also introduced the ‘Mountain Self-Protection Plan’.

The ‘Mountain Self-Protection Plan’ (written in Spanish and Galician) is a creative, poetic output of the project, while functioning as a legal text enshrining the rights of the mountain. The document was inspired by other similar processes, such as the law approved in September 2022 to grant legal personhood to the Mar Menor Lagoon in Murcia, Spain, and the 2024 Declaration of Rights of the Tins River in Galicia, Spain. The content of this self-protection plan is the result of a collaborative process between the artist, mediator, the Couso community and neighbouring communities. It includes topics such as the care, protection, use, production and transmission of knowledge in the territory.

Alicia Ruiz described the document as ‘a starting point for them in the future to confront any kind of risky situation with more confidence and start working for legal recognition of the territory’.

Intergenerational collaboration

‘The project is about how to attract young people to the woodland and how to welcome people from other contexts; to make visible this way of living and the way they manage the forest.’
Alicia Ruiz, Concomitentes Cultural Manager

In their first meeting with mediator Natalia Balseiro, the Couso community described their dream of passing the baton to the next generation, raising awareness of common land management among the younger population and promoting their active participation in the woodland community. Despite their hopes, the mediation process was not successful in engaging young people and, during the evaluation, the Couso community lamented ‘the low participation of young people’.

However, the two-year project was only the starting point for intergenerational collaboration in Couso. The annual festival-ritual will be an ongoing tool of futures thinking, responsive to shifting community needs. The ritual protocol (PDF 4.3MB), written in Galician, outlines that each iteration must be inclusive and promote intergenerational integration within the community.

Rurality and cultural policy

The Concomitentes team has been committed to building bridges between the local living lab in Montes de Couso, Spanish government and European cultural policy. In this regard, they have:

• Participated in the design of the Spanish Government Cultural Rights Plan, led by Jazmín Beirak, Director General of Cultural Rights and Ernest Urtasun, Minister of Culture.
• Presented at the 6th European Forum of Culture and Ruralities. See Fran Quiroga’s chapter in ‘Thinking and Doing in Rural Places: Cultural Practices in Context’ (PDF 7.6MB).
• Welcomed Benito Burgos, the Sub-Directorate General for Culture with the Autonomous Communities of the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Sport, to Montes de Couso.
• Attended ‘La nueva Bahaus Europea: Cambio de paradigma’ (YouTube video) (‘The new European Bauhaus: Paradigm shift’) at the European Parliament, where Spanish MEP Marcos Ros presented ALILASUS.

‘Culture is sustainability.’
Xosé Antón Araúxo, Montes de Couso Community Leader

Lessons, tips and advice

The role of culture in community governance

ALILASUS aimed to experiment with new governance models and generate relational spaces for decision making that respond to the urgency of the climate crisis with care and compassion. The Couso community already had a horizontal governance system where each ‘house with smoke’ (a metaphor for an inhabited home) votes in the woodland management decision making. In the context of the complex solutions required for the climate and ecological crisis, Natalia Balseiro shared her methodologies and experiences from the cultural sector to support more dynamic and participatory self-governance.

The varied methods of creative mediation made decision making more accessible to different people and brought the Montes de Couso community together in new ways: neighbours literally walked together, addressing dilemmas and conflicts. This produced a relational transformation in the community, whereby community connections were formed and deepened.

‘Although the Concomitentes methodology concludes with the production of an artistic work that can serve as an iconic and celebratory element of this community, what is truly relevant is how producing the work and its process facilitate a space for slow listening that breaks many of the productivist logics. These ways of making art help strengthen citizen agency, because being a community is necessary, but loving one another as a community is even more revolutionary.’
Natalia Balserio, mediator

Adaptability

The Land Commons project underscored the importance of adaptability. Concomitentes initially aimed for seamless community engagement and straightforward implementation of artistic interventions. However, the complexity of balancing diverse community needs and wishes required more time than initially anticipated. This meant that the original timeline had to shift by three or four months to better meet the realities on the ground. To address these deviations, the project team refined their participatory methods and expanded the project scope. See the flexible approaches to gather the community in the Project Description.

One example of adapting pre-existing plans to be more inclusive is with the project evaluation. Some of the evaluation tools, such as Google Forms, developed by Interuniversity Centre for Research on Atlantic Landscapes and Cultures were inappropriate for diverse community contexts and excluded older participants. Instead, these surveys were done on paper and explained in person. These small adjustments aimed to ensure the project remained relevant and was grounded in the community’s actual needs and circumstances.

Partners and stakeholders

ALILASUS Consortium

Across the European project, each living lab had a lead partner – Concomitentes (Spain), La Société des Nouveaux Commanditaires (France) and De Nieuwe Opdrachtgevers (Belgium) – with experience of developing citizen-commissioned art. The ‘New Patrons Protocol’ inspired the practice of the three lead partners. The Protocol is a methodology where citizen-commissioners, artists and cultural mediators work together to develop works of art that respond to a need identified in their social context.

Concomitentes is a non-profit association founded in June 2018 to promote the creation of artworks that engage with their social context. Concomitentes invites civil society groups to become the citizen-commissioners or ‘comitentes’ of an artwork and then accompanies them through the ensuing process of creative negotiation with an artist.

The Interuniversity Centre for Research on Atlantic Landscapes and Cultures (Spain), part of the Galician University System, conducted an independent evaluation of the project.

Montes de Couso Community

The Land Commons project was developed in partnership with the Montes de Couso community, who were involved from the very beginning. Montes de Couso is an active community of 84 people who collectively manage a total of 330 hectares of communal woodland, 300 hectares of which are productive. Land management decisions are made by the commoners and agreed by the Montes de Couso Governing Board. All those who live in a ‘house with smoke’ (a metaphor for a house that is inhabited), have the right to vote in the decision making and election of, or participation in, the Governing Board.

Xosé Antón assembled the community for the Land Commons project through their pre-established communication channels: e-mailing, WhatsApp groups, posters and door-to-door conversations.

‘From the beginning we have been committed to placing value on the forest so that people respect it and take care of it. The more activities the forest has, the less fires we will have, the less rubbish and pollution there will be, because the forest will be occupied by people who are aware of its importance. Furthermore, we want to make young people aware that the forest can be their future and that the forest can offer everything: art, culture, entertainment, sport, work…’
Xosé Antón Araúxo, Montes de Couso Community Leader

Other partners and stakeholders include:

• The ALILASUS project had an external advisory board consisting of four external experts and six representatives from the projects in Belgium, France and Spain.
• Artist Asunción Molinos Gordo whose focus is contemporary peasantry and the role of the small-scale farmer as cultural agent, responsible for both perpetuating traditional knowledge and for generating new expertise.
• Mediator Natalia Balseiro, who designs projects and processes that revolve around art, culture, participation and democratic innovation, at the local, regional, national, and international levels.
• Neighbouring communities in Gondomar and other woodland communities in Galicia, such as the Community of Vincios.
• The mountain, who was regarded as a collaborator throughout the project.

Funding

The Land Commons project received approximately 80% (€80.701,90) of funding from the European Commission and 20% from The Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation (€26.839,10). The project had in-kind contributions from the Montes de Couso community, which co-financed some communication materials, organised food for events and donated space for workshops.

Relevant links

• During ALILASUS, the project partners produced The Green Art Commission Toolkit to imagine and write an ecological art commission. The toolkit can frame a group discussion or be played as a team imagination game.
• Concomitentes developed a follow-up project, Art Living Lab to Repair the Land. It focuses on three ‘damaged’ European territories: ‘Energy Aftermath’ in Barruelo de Santullán (Spain), ‘Agriculture Aftermath’ in Wietstock (Germany) and ‘Electricity Aftermath’ in Šibenik (Croatia).

All images courtesy of Concomitentes.