This summer has been intense. The “terral” wind that blows into the Guadalorce valley around the end of June is hot and oppressive. However, the landscape always puts on a show and this summer, due to the rains we had last November which drenched the soil and roots of all vegetal matter and flooded the plains of the Guadalhorce valley created disruptions but also (re)generation. The fields of this ancient landscape awoke this year to a local euphoria of rebirth and renewal in the pueblo. The farmers farming, the local folk in the fields and in the markets, the little patches of green edible matter or 'huertas' are visible everywhere along the dusty trails here but this year was especially potent after five years of drought provoked by climate change.. 

The 'huevo de toro' tomatoes have never been so weighted and so full of potent red microbiotic nutrition for many a humble Spanish family. A home-made 'gazpacho' is known to be a thirst-quencher in the summer in Andalucia. It is a vitamin-rich red liquid matter of fruity metabolic goodness with rather large fleshy seeds for replanting. It carries with it our ancestors.  It is is a sign for the future to be reborn again next year. I guard my 'huevo de toro' tomato seeds preciously in small glass jars as the farmer in Campillos, Jose-Antonio, told me to. Never in a plastic container.. 

A radical practice in today's world to think that life is filled with hope and gratitude because it is now the end of August and the olive trees are heavily laden with the weight of lush, juicy olives of all registers, almost as if they were anticipating their harvesting once again this coming October. It is as if they wait thirstily for the rains again to replenish their stamina into the thickness of their rhizomatic rootball wisened to the circle of life.

One year passes so fast here at BAJO EL OLIVO, but time encapsulates a myriad of events happening constantly around Casa Mia. The air, the soil, the vegetal matter that surrounds us here is bustling with activity and the chicharras (cicadas) are sounding out with the rhythms of summer and the coming fall and bring everything into a heightened frenzy and pitch of transformation and intensities.

The Sun. The Sun. The Sun, the Sky, the endless, vast Blue Sky, the Mediterranean sea that sends the salty air across the Sierra de Mijas mountains to where we live and thrive.

We have had only three guest residents this year and it could be that the summer heat is a reason that hosting here is a becoming. Once a time to escape the city and to look for a bucolic landscape to flourish, artists are staying home and I feel the fall or early spring is now a fitter time for guests visiting when the temperatures are much more comfortable for doing field-work outside. There is still an absolute slowness to everything here. 

When I am at my computer, there is a razor-sharp focus on the devastations wrought upon the planet and I read a lot to keep my mind-body relationship positive with such incredible thinkers. I just finished three books already this summer. They are: "The Light Eaters" by Zoë Schlanger, "Forest Euphoria" by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian and "Terrafilia", a beautifully illustrated exhibition catalogue of amazing art work from all disciplines including historical works from the permanent collection of the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. This exhibition is curated by my favorite Austrian curator and eco-thinker, Daniella Zyman. The exhibition is on until September in Madrid. A must see for anyone visiting Spain....

This summer, I spend a lot of time in my studio writing and creating new concepts for projects, collaborating with local artists and building energy and momentum for the winter for when I return to Montreal.  I am multiplying worlds for earthy co-existence and I am still very much affected by the pluriversal instability of the world-earth relations and I am still encoding and focusing on critical ecologies and decolonial perspectives, theoretical and sensory approaches to understand how we respond to nature. 

BAJO EL OLIVO fosters knowledge and artistic radical practices that are accountable for their relations to land, the ecological matrix and the embodied experiences of its people. We collaborate here with artists, activists, and educators associated with Posthumanism, animal studies, plant sentience and cultural ethnography, multi-species thinking and I am attuned  more than ever to Indigenous and Black Studies to acknowledge the agency of non-human life forms and inanimate matter as sentient beings, raising their status as political subjects and insisting on their liveliness. Even the water conservation project that is implemented in our small community of San Jorge is a small microcosm of tethering to the land. Our turquoise swimming pool is shared with a family of seven frogs and  is closely guarded as a force that holds the cosmos together.

Indeed the swimming pool has been used a lot this year induced by guest residents who need “work breaks” to reset and recharge from working in the field or in the studio gallery. I think about what water does to shift our perspective. In the midst of things and it is not hard here to recognize the field itself as a dynamic and shifting space as we attune to it. As artist and writer, Diann Bauer writes:

"It is not enough to hover in the familiar. We must inhabit the alien-not through mastery or domination but through the optimization of constraints, recognition of the broader sense of “we” and our diverse capacities”.

My burrowing into a Montreal winter remakes our relationship with a site and reorients me to the what is established but also for what may further expand into another season of creative activations and transformations. As Director of BAJO EL OLIVO, I returned later this year from Montreal, Canada, due to an important conference that I participated in with the Centre for Sensory Studies at Concordia Universty, Montreal, where I teach and that involved a new creative work that was presented as part of the conference and supported by a professional development grant. This immersive and interactive audio-visual project took all my creative juices during the winter months to put together. My teaching contracts and art projects are now part of a yearly residency from home away from home and a responsibility that did not bring me back to nature until well into the middle of May.  It felt good to be on Spanish soil again with my husband, dogs and cat and spring was well underway.   My burrowing into a Montreal winter remakes our relationship with a site and reorients me to the what is established. It always further expands into another season of creative activations and transformations as errant wanderings. 

The fieldwork that I promote is full of curatorial thresholds that gives me a fresher outlook for exploring new methodologies of fieldwork and I thrust myself again into this process to draw on all my speculations, transform them and regenerate these concepts for radical art practices, curatorial relations and new artistic audio-visual projects that are unfolding for the collective: CEREUS with Alexandre Pépin, in the future.

Artist and Educator, Derek Brueckner from Winnipeg, Canada returned once more to BAJO EL OLIVO to further his explorations. I was able to navigate his request to work with several local Malaga creative practitioners but also to concentrate on what those actions could generate for acting and being in the world. The conditions for how that activity takes place as a facilitator creates and contributes to an attunement of feelings, forces, shapes and sonic textures in the field itself. 

Other creative humans were weaving and collaborating as both a material actuality but also as a ‘thereness' of approaching fieldwork as an unfolding assemblage of practices or practising, Field-working, trusting, witnessing, weaving, fiction-(ing), fabulating, anarchiving and binding, created a multitude or ways of witnessing and participating and letting the magic happen between parties–a communing so to speak. An energy that is only possible in such environmental surroundings as an orientation and experiments in imagining, other-wiseness.         I would like to thank local performance, sound and choreographic artists such as: Cris Savage, Daniel Blacksmith, Niche Ramirez and the ama`zing “Gu!atari” collective: Laura Maillo Palmer and Alejandro Benitez Romero. Also a special mention to: the Random Visuals Collective in the heart of downtown Malaga who helped manifest these worlds.

Visiting artist, Derek Brueckner wrote up this project proposal for the residency in May (2025):

"While at the Bajo Olivo residency, I will explore collaborative projects that engage with the material agency of live visual media through a hybridized practice that combines performance, puppetry, animation, and live-feed projection.

Potentially grounded in aspects of New Materialist theory (which you introduced me to—thank you again for that!), I aim to foreground the vitality and co-agency of materials such as paper, fabric, the human body, light, and digital projection. These elements will be approached not as passive vessels, but as active participants in the process of meaning-making, still to be determined and open-ended.

Rather than treating media as inert tools, the proposed project(s) strives to involve both viewers and collaborators into a responsive, interactive ecology in which materials animate, deform, resist, and entangle with collaborative processes and low-fi technologies.

Eliciting on traditions of puppetry (as improvised found objects and organic matter), animation, and embodied performance, the work integrates unscripted gestures with real-time projection to generate emergent, process-driven experiences. The outcome is a multisensory environment where affect, movement, and materiality co-create in ways that exceed fixed representation, opening the collaborative performance and multimedia installation into a more "porous" and exploratory space".

Thank you, Derek Brueckner for your heart-felt participation and collaboration.