Mon 6 Sep
Clean the appartment then do my grocery shopping at Ruzafa market using my basic but effective spanish!– veggies, anchovies, truffle cheese, eggs, Albufera rice, Horta butter beans, some beautiful figs and a bottle of garnacha. Make a huge pot of stew - onion, garlic, ginger, turmeric, black pepper (increases tumeric bioavailability x 10), parsley stems, half a cauli, a litre of tomato water from Andreu’s house, a glug of crianza, aniseed, thyme, lentils, garrofon (Valencia famous butter beans which notoriously drink all the liquids). After almost two hours, I turn off the heat and stir in some slices of slightly sad looking green beans and parsley leaf and return the lid.
Nestor invites me to see a retrospective group show at Luis Adelantado, we chat with the gallerist, then wind through crowds to have a couple of vermouths in the plaza nr Carmen. Olive and orange garnish, what a combo! I come home and eat my stew w pickled chilis and crushed up crisps.
Tues 7 Sep
Slept like shit again – mixture of humidity and inability to switch dang brain off. Usually I would wait until it kicks down a gear, but decided to get up and write instead. It worked in part as in the morning I found something of mildly interesting content – albeit lacking sense, spelling or syntax – that I executed with only one eye open:
4:30am
Controlling image of horta to be romantic and classical as a symbol for low-tech and stagnant - hard work, toil (wiliam morris) - helps create an argument for smooth capitalism - convenience, luxurious, instantaneous. Supports endless growth while ripping land from the commons and undercutting labour or produce. But the tools and methodoligeis of farming, of small scale horticulture contains the practical adn conceptual vigour that lay a road map for the future post-capitalist.
Go back to LETNO, look at this more. Museology - relics of past. Existence in vitrine renders them inert, dead, confines them to unusability. I wonder how far different they are from tools being used in the horta today? They still use the same irrigation system, built 1000 years ago by Syrians. I saw a poster today by Camp Books that said History is speculative fiction. YESSS the trimming of the reality into a presentable nugget, creating a case for a temporal separation. Removes possibility that history is a slow present, tethered to a succession of moments, held together w ideas, materials and quantum physics.
I ate two almost-defrosted plums right before therapy (a taxing and enlightening session), then talked to my mum (currently camping in Norfolk) and my brother (chilling just outside of Copenhagen). My emotional resources were pretty depleted, so I watched Sopranos and ate a horrid ‘fridge roulette’ lunch that screwed me into a bad mood.
WED 8 Sep
Roof yoga, I buy a spanner from the hardware store –translated as “la ferreteria” as in iron as in ferrous metals – and change the inner tube on Elena’s bike in a closed shop doorway, then pay 1euro for the guy fixing bikes from the stalls on the perimeter of Ruzafa market to oil the gears and pump the tyres. I tend to a few emails, make plum & aniseed jam using fresh Valencia orange juice instead of water, then have an enthusing meeting with Jorgge Manna Baretto (instigated by Liverpool Biennial). We talk about land access and interspecies exploitation in the context of urban / rural food production,
I take vegan stew, eggs and jam to Carles’ apartment and we cook lunch together. He puts slices of a huge tomato w the watermelon pickles we made, black olives, olive oil and salt. I poach the eggs and heat through the stew, we discuss the workshop later and make a plan.
The workshop goes swimmingly; we engage on a deep level with the conceptual framework of lactofermenting within my anticapitalist practice; we eat sauerkraut w manchego, bread and jam while discussing ubiquity of fermented foods and the range of flavour profiles; we distill the logic for dynamic & practical skill-sharing and against rigid & elitist recipes; we break down and shred cabbages, add salt and take turns to massage a bucket full of kraut-to-be while “massage music” plays from youtube on a speaker; we acknowledge the interspecies support between peasant and indigeonous wisdom, microbial digestion and plant thing-ness.
Thurs 9sep
rooftop sunrise
time privilege
sauerkraut is an
antagonist lifeforce
*
Boss breakfast of fruit, cheese, nuts, rice cakes, pickles.
Got minor sunstroke after bathing and eating on the roof for a few hours, was flat out and nauseous until mid-afternoon when I had online meetings w my pal Emii about plants and Greg about water pumps. Took a long walk around Ruzafa at 7 and talked to an old friend, then caught up with the Darplings about a group project in Derby in winter.
Late stew & boiled spuds w a glass of vermouth, wrote a report into the early hours.
*
Fri 10 Sep
Up at the crack of dawn again, read, exercised, showered. Had a meeting w Paula about the project. Cycled to Benimaclet to meet an internet friend who is visiting for the weekend. Walked around Espai Verd and took loads of photos like i was back in foundation. Read my book in a busy park then went for a sundown swim in Cabanayal.
Sat 11 Sep
Lifted from an instagram post:
I cycled to Alboraya this morning to meet @carlesangelsauri and @guillermo_ros. Guillo drove us to Horchata Sabies, one of the longest running family owned horchateries, just north in Almassera. With Meliana, this collection of towns is the birthplace of Orxata / horchata, a remarkable non-dairy milk drink usually served w slushy ice. I had some delicious fartons, too.
The main ingredient is chufa (tigernut — a sedge grass root, not a nut!) grown by peasant farmers who are still very present in the land immediately surrounding. The horchateria is dressed w photos (including one of @guillermo_ros grandfather drinking wine in the chufa fields whilst working) and original tiles painted w menus and characters.
The drink is naturally sweet and creamy without being sickly and is loved by Valencians, who refill huge buckets of it to take to family events or keep in the fridge. Guillo tells me that you can taste the difference between horchata recipes, particularly the late earthy notes, which describe the soil type, mineral or fertiliser usage, tool choice and labour effort. This, for me, speaks to the "terroir" @pascalbaudar writes about for wild food, but relating to the human interaction w the growing medium.
The industry has been responsibly scaled up, with many processes still requiring skillful manual labour. I had a romantic idea of classic tools being used. There's also a pic of Carles and I posing with a 90 year old tumbler used to clean sand and dirt off the chufa.
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Cycled home to watch Spurs get trounced by Palace, had a slap up lunch w roast peppers, homemade hummus, pickles and a veggie samosa still hot from the grocer. Drank some orxata and watched Sopranos, then took my Kathrin Bohm book to Parc Central for a sundown study session. Took myself for a run in the dark, ran a cold bath and read some more.
All this time alone is having quite an effect on me: it allows for more opportunity to get caught up in my thoughts, to ponder each possibility (sometimes obsessively), dissolves time linearity and meal regularity, illustrates how I always feel like I have to be doing something whilst simultaneoulsy doing nowt. After 3 weeks of being here, I am beginning to relax. There is tyranny in structurelessnes, and though I’ve always known it’s far clearer now I left to my own devices in a strange new place.
This is a personal reminder that being here is enough. I don’t have anything to prove to anyone. Every day is an opportunity to breathe again. Every breath is an opportunity to move my body in a different way. Every movement is an opportunity to understand the cosmic forces at play.
As my therapist reminded me recently, I will always follow myself around. No matter the city or timezone, the crowds or solitude, the exact same anxieties and doubts are in company – stitched into my clothes or tucked deep in a book spine or stuck to my shoe’s sole or buried in my follicles. Occasionally, with exercise, I can bring them to the surface, pearlescent beads of internal conflict. In letting them roll down my forehead, along the groove of my nose, towards my chin, I wait and gratefully taste the bitterness. They are of me and taste as so. I would not palate those of another, so why my own? Who am I to fell my own crest, to wring my own wrists, to punch my own gut?
Sun 12 Sep
Classic “chill” sunday for my standards. Roof yoga, cycled to climbing, learnt how to use a bunch of exercise kit like those knobbly cylinders, kettle bells, stretchy bands, and a trolley wheel on a lil pole. Wasn’t so enthused with the actual climbing, was quite distracted w some personal stuff, but i did manage to scale a few problems i couldn’t top last time and topped a few from the next difficulty up. Cycled into Carmen to meet a friend-of-a-friend and her pal for vermouth, then took the long route home through Turia park and sat in a skatepark reading. Getting geared up to head into Pols tomorrow, arms full of fruit seeds and peels that have been drying on an upside down crate in the kitchen all week.