ocupa #8: antecâmara, by luis lecea romera

More than 160 years have passed since the first eucalyptus seeds arrived in Galicia, sent from Australia by a missionary from the village of Tui, on the northern bank of the Minho river. On both sides of ‘A Raia’—’the Stripe,’ the term referring to the border between Portugal and Galicia—the tree grew into a symbol of economic prosperity, contributing to the development of national paper industries under the Salazarist and Francoist regimes respectively, and serving as a geoengineering tool within an ideological project of totalitarian subjugation and profitable exploitation of the landscape. Antecâmara follows the artist’s interest in examining the deterioration processes of territories as revelatory of their underlying historical and socio-political complexities. Conceived after a scouting around the margins of the Gerês Natural Park, Luis Lecea Romera deploys a sound composition based on field recordings from scorched earth after forest fires caused by eucalyptus trees, assessing not what the reserve protects but what it protects itself from. By inducing these sounds as vibrations into chainsaw components, the piece behaves as an ideophonic instrument with its own sound, using its body as a resonating material. The installation alludes to the tools of action used by the Diseucalyptising Brigades as cross-border expressions of environmental resistance against the degradation of rural areas in response to a lingering legacy of the Iberian dictators
Luis Lecea Romera (Madrid, 1992) is an artist, architect and musician based in Amsterdam and Madrid. His practice manipulates material and aural spaces through site-relational installations, compositions and performances.

this work was created with the support of FIBER Festival and Semibreve Festival, as part of the RE:SOURCE Reassemble Residency.