Listening to the Will of the Territory: Jaime Otero Páramo's Residency at Foresta

Thinking with a garden is an in-place residency series and a platform for cross-pollinated research and practice in the expanded field and contact zone between arts, regenerative food systems, spatial practices and ecologies. Residencies unfold as collective practice, research projects, workshops, installations, planting formats, public talks and other interventions in the physical location of Foresta-in-becoming in Asturias. Our vision is that it will offer a frame to cultivate life-generating contact with this place and its inhabitants, nurture multispecies communities, reciprocity, and care for ecological relations.

In the autumn 2024 we planted the first seeds of the forest garden of Foresta, while hosting Jaime Otero Páramo, founder of Proyecto Dispersor in Galicia, where he has been designing and cultivating forest gardens and spreading knowledge about regenerative agroforestry since 2017.

Everything can be seeded, absolutely everything! So what are seeds? What is a forest? How can a forest be a regenerative food system? What is an agroforestry nest? This residency unfurled within the ethics of attentive multispecies conviviality and offered a workshop covering the basics of envisioning, designing, seeding and planting a forest garden, in philosophical and practical terms. Such subjects as preparing the soil, democracy of natural energy and ecosystem dynamics, neoindigenism and the human role within the ecosystem, were touched.

The public talk and an open conversation after the workshop revolved around subjects connected to deep ecology and an understanding of landscape as an ingredient for a change of social and political consciousness, also touching on subjects connected to sustainability in agricultural practices, care for the landscapes that sustain us, and pathways to navigate human transition towards an ecologically regenerative living.

More details: https://www.foresta-collective.com/th...