“For those who follow” Memories transmission in family crop fields

My degree project is about family crop fields in my village, Garciotum in Spain, and how with the next generation that is going to inherit the land, the knowledge and traditions that came with it are going to get lost.  

Spain, like many other parts of the world, has had a strong family farming tradition. With each family having a small piece of land that they cultivated for their own consumption and, whose ownership, passed from parents to children as a way of leaving them wealth. For many years, wheat, barley, but also fruit trees were grown to provide enough for a family to sustain itself.

This way of life was broken with the immigration to the capitals and industrialization in the 60's. But the people who used to work on these lands continue to value the land as a provider of wealth. When they retired and returned to live in the village, they returned to take care of small fields. Their way of thinking is that the better they cultivate the land, the better fruits they will obtain and the more wealth they will leave to their children.

The following generations will cultivate a different way of relating to this land that they no longer look at with an economic motivation.

My project aims to accompany the families of the village to transform the land from a material heritage, into an emotional heritage. The first part of the concept is a collective memory building activity, which aims to transmit these memories from one generation to another.

The second part of the project aims to preserve the knowledge of the fields and their traditions through a memory walk in which plaques are displayed with the stories collected during the activity.

Building this heritage around the traditional knowledge of the fields is necessary not only because with this last generation of caretakers a certain knowledge and a certain way of thinking will disappear, but also as a way of recognizing all the silent work that these people have done for years, so that the trees will be bigger and bigger and their fruits richer.

Ultimately, this project aims to liberate the process that I have gone through, as well as the neighbours of my village. So that other people who are in the same situation as my family, can appropriate it.

The name of the project “Para los que vienen detrás” (trans. “For those who follow”) is an expression used in some areas of Spain that refers to the next generation of people who are going to take over something, in this case, the family crop fields. It is possible to hear this expression when older people talk about the fields referring to what they are going to give as an inheritance to their descendants.

“I have planted three more olive trees so that those who follow will have a bigger harvest.” J.

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