What is it?
Casa de Lava is permaculture and cinema meetings open to the different explorations that contemporary non-fiction has recently carried out: from ecology and materiality in the various film practices to the voices that emerge from another perspective other than the hegemonic one, claiming from feminism a traditionally hidden visibility. Or those radicals who build utopian landscapes and summon the memory of the Earth as an anchoring point in the face of an anthropogenic nature that vanishes in the blink of an eye.
From a specific environment, between different towns, regions, and geographical demarcations, between fields of almond and olive trees, and in an emotional, minor, and plural community, these coexistences will occur as if we were farmers while harvesting the fruit. We will share concerns and theories on the threshing floor, that ancient space where the collected honey was threshed, halfway between ritual and customs, between memory and the new creation. We will share our territories under the summer sun and, during the night, under the stars, when we will intervene to experiment. We will witness a change in the spectatorial paradigm that will be the projection in the open field of different works, along with sound experiments to create a new, imagined landscape from darkness and nighttime.
Spot
Casa de Lava takes place in a specific space in the southern Catalan geography. These meetings occur in the province of Tarragona, in the Baix Camp region, a few kilometres from Reus and Riudoms, in Mas Maurici. And why in this space? One of the most obvious reasons is that besides its excellent communication and being a privileged enclave in the middle of the countryside and at the foot of the Pre-coastal Mountain Range under the Mussara, it is also a space of resistance on many levels. Firstly, in the surrounding areas, cinema and other arts are holding on as best they can due to cultural and government agents' lack of means or willingness to promote them. Also, in a more natural and environmental sense, it is a Mediterranean landscape affected by nearby anthropocentric landscapes that have modified the area's rhythms and sources of wealth and energy. In this way, if we look at the horizon, we find refineries, windmills, a nuclear centre, and, not to mention, a well-known theme park like Port Aventura, which is closer than far. These tensions between the local and the global, between past and present (and future), and between the visible and the invisible make this location a perfect place to reflect through cinema and thought without barriers, everything that surrounds us. Thus, the community can propose measures and changes to strengthen links and synergies from affection and closeness.
The Via family, who have populated these lands for years and exploited them, continue to live off the fruits of the land in Mas Maurici. It is a quiet space in the countryside, in the beauty of light and water (although it seems scarce) and among the fruits and pruning of nature's cycle. An open space, without fences or restrictions, for all those who commit to change and avoid a specific time to (re)think(themselves).