Green, how I want you green.
Green wind. Green branches.
The ship out on the sea
and the horse on the mountain.

–Federico García Lorca

This series of films departs from a conversation on landscape in the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca and Mahmoud Darwish. It posits landscape as a place of connection as well as a reflection on memory, distance, and exile. The figure of the olive tree connects a wide Mediterranean region through millennia of parallel agricultural ritual and ecological coexistence. The olive branch is known as a symbol of peace while residing in a region that has been cut apart and divided.

Trees are a living archive of the land. Olive trees can live up to thousands of years, making them a stable and familiar element for generations of their neighbours. The olive branch is a symbol of peace whose stable grip has been wrested from the soil. They are also targets in the ongoing catastrophe in Palestine that is impossible not to speak of.

***

Hornachos lies to the north of Seville and to the east of Badajoz. Sparse shrubs cover its arid hills interlaced with qanat – intricate systems of underground irrigation channels built during Al-Andalus. These invisible waters still flow through the darkness, giving the name to the film Tunnel of Stars (2023). These infrastructures provide and conceal the erased history that lies beneath the soil. A canal progressively fills with mould and plastic waste, tainting the air with the stagnant scent of agglomerate abandoned history. Stories of love, death, and pillage seep through noxious slime-covered walls and the croaks of frogs.

García Vidal walks along a landscape that carries millenia of stories and the voices of the local campesinos whose lives are testament to its mystery. It was said that in the village of Usaga, the daughter of the sultan, Cantamora, had come to the well to meet her Christian lover. Upon the knowledge of his death at the sword of her father’s guards she threw herself into this fountain. Her voice still sings of her agony beneath the sounds of crickets. Found among its waters is the desbautizadero– a place for de-baptisms. The practice of false conversions became common among the Muslim population who would rush their children to wash away the chrism and their imposed Christian names. During the inquisition, their dispossessed portable property was carried away to Germany, draining the region of population and material wealth during the reign of Charles V. In the 20th century, the tunnels became hideouts for the persecuted soldiers of the civil war who clung to the sides of the wells to save their lives from the nationalist armies. Vagabond partisans called tisi inhabited the mossy wells during the dictatorship, resisting the occupation by living in hiding, evading the concentration camps for internal enemies.

History is spoken under the stars, carried on the peasant tongues of the orchard’s current carers. They recall memories of childhood, legends of the valley, and their connection to the water that is slowly drying out. The qanat’s construction expected a world of tolerance and planned the longevity of a system for thousands of years – instead they have witnessed expropriation, forced migrations, and hundreds of years of violence against these lands: social, economic, and ecological. They remain entrenched in the mountain as a geological witness of dispossession and abandonment, as neighbours to the fragments of bone from the massacres of the last century that nobody dares unearth.

Andrés García Vidal is an artist and sound recordist based between Andalusia and Amsterdam. Working within the frame of sound studies, he has a focus on aural and oral culture. From an interest in audio’s intrusive scope and its capacity to “break into” he explores specific territories through the notion of noise, speech and participative processes. Among these territories is his home region of southern Spain, where layers of history, religious oppression, resistance and contemporary crisis have distinctive aural manifestations.

Àngels Miralda (1990) is an independent writer and curator. Her recent exhibitions have taken place at Something Else III (Cairo Biennale); Garage Art Space (Nicosia); Radius CCA (Delft), P////AKT (Amsterdam), Tallinn Art Hall (Estonia), MGLC – International Centre for Graphic Arts (Ljubljana), De Appel (Amsterdam), Galerija Miroslav Kraljevic (Municipal Gallery of Zagreb), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chile (Santiago), Museu de Angra do Heroísmo (Terceira – Azores), and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (Riga). Miralda wrote for Artforum from 2019-2023 and regularly publishes with Terremoto (Mexico City), A*Desk (Barcelona), Arts of the Working Class (Berlin), and is editor-in-chief of Collecteurs (New York).