Olga Olivera-Tabeni
Handicrafts as one of the fine arts. Paper flowers printed with Google Earth maps. 2024.
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Handicrafts as one of the fine arts is a distant herbarium but also refers to vegetal neotoponymy. These are the generic names of plants and flowers we have assigned to the streets of certain urbanizations. These are the names found in a conventional garden: geraniums, orchids, tulips, carnations... Without specifying subclass, species, details, or, evidently, scientific nomenclature. These are flowers often drawn or crafted on paper in the simplest possible way, sometimes generic, and which could be from anywhere. From a Google Maps aerial view, hardly any details can be distinguished.
In some cases, in this type of urbanization, the traditional name is preserved, representing continuity with a pre-existing name; in others, a new toponym is added that, while generic, could be related to plants that might have grown there. However, it is more common to turn old toponyms into new ones of a commercial and simplistic character.
Handicrafts as fine arts can be understood as the naturalist herbariums of the Anthropocene, preserved in the remnants of a modern garden city—obsolete yet still desired. These are flowers we must learn to press and classify. At the same time, they are maps locating foreclosed properties, houses, and chalets in these urbanizations and floral streets, a consequence of the "construction boom." Examples include a property on Gardenia Street (in the Claramunt urbanization), another between Orchid and Geranium Streets (in Planas del Rey), and others in Rustical Mont-Roig, Castellmoster, Miami Playa, or La Alzineta.
Handicrafts as one of the fine arts is an ironic variation on the title of Thomas de Quincey’s essay. It is a homemade herbarium, on paper, as simple as its name suggests, like a handicraft, made of absorbent newspaper, but without a single blade of grass.
Note
This herbarium is discovered by following Dani Giraldo and his family—Andrea Klinkert, Eçkwe, Yu’a, and Emanuel—transhumant shepherds from the Priorat, Tarragona, who, at the request of the European Heritage Days in the autumn of 2022, were invited to reopen an old, half-erased transhumance route in l’Hospitalet de l’Infant. They later returned to their home by following the river of Llastres.
The route, which goes from Cala de las Ocas in l’Hospitalet to Pratdip and then to Alforja, takes us through several urbanizations that are part of this project, such as Vanessa Park or Planas del Rey. In these urbanizations, some chalets have been foreclosed, are owned by banks, or have been turned into houses for the growing squatter market. Similar urbanizations appear near the Mussara mountain (in Alforja), close to where the Giraldo family spends the winter.
These urbanizations represent the opposite of the family’s ideal, more linked to self-construction and the common good. Nevertheless, they are part of contiguous living spaces filled with friction, contradictions, intersections, contrasts, and inconsistencies within these strange liquid archipelagos, referencing Bauman, which shape the new landscapes of our contemporary world.
This project was made possible thanks to the support of ADDEND, Comissariat, in Morera de Montsant, and was exhibited at Mapamundistas 2024, Beneath the Surface, in Pamplona, as part of the exhibition The Depths. Curator: Alexandra Baurès.