CONOCIMIENTO NO VULGAR

2015

Video (color, sound), 08’32’’, and 7 pieces of legislation printed on paper.

This work was created during El Ranchito-Colombia residency, Matadero-Madrid, 2015.

Exhibitions:

‘La medida de las cosas’, Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, Cerezales del Condado, León, 2019. Curated by Jorge Blasco Gallardo.

Header image: Courtesy of Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, Cerezales del Condado, León.

This project focused on the study of the legal categories that regulate the circulation and use of new plant species for food or medicinal use, specifically the Spanish legal regime for the protection of plant varieties.

Within the set of laws and decrees issued from 1961 to the present day, all agree in granting the category of “breeder” in absolute exclusivity to the personnel that modify crops in the laboratory, denying the farmer the fruit of their own intellectual and scientific production. The aforementioned legislation does not recognize the work of improving seeds and creating new crops, carried out by generations and generations of farmers.

The intention of this project is to reverse the direction of the interrogation and study processes, where legislation and science lead the way in cataloguing the world's entities. This time it is about using one of the analysis tools typical of the rural environment, the zahorí dowsing, to carry out a transversal decoding of this set of laws and attend to its other possible readings.

The zahorí’s dowsing practice consists of finding water or electromagnetic currents with the help of a pendulum, hazelnut or metal rods. This technique has been used in rural communities since ancient times for divinatory purposes. Dowsers are said to have the ability to see what is hidden, even if it is under the ground.

The dowser Leoncio Frutos held a complete pendulum session in which he examined the possible consequences that these laws may have on farmers.