Les Cabasses

Places

Les Cabasses represents the material and symbolic point of connection between the rururban territory of the Parc Agrari and the cultural and economic processes promoted by LaFundició in the peripheral urban territory of l’Hospitalet and La Marina (Barcelona). The agricultural production of Les Cabasses is integrated into a short circuit of production, distribution, and consumption promoted by LaFundició since 2018, when the Keras Buti project began. On the one hand, its agricultural production will be destined for the Keras Buti cooperative, the organic store and community space Keras Buti Chalmeta (located in the La Chalmeta housing cooperative), and the kitchens of the La Suculenta community dining rooms, while also creating jobs for migrants and the Roma community of l’Hospitalet. The objective of this circuit is to generate viable and sustainable economies that can satisfy the basic needs of the urban peripheries, in a way that respects people, the environment, and the territory, and that function under democratic criteria and social justice.

On the other hand, Les Cabasses is the setting for diverse processes and spaces of thought and practice that explore the relationships of interdependence between material production and symbolic production, understanding that both are reciprocally overdetermined. Thus, both the production of food and the material transformations of the landscape necessary to obtain it are conditioned by a whole series of narratives, imaginaries, and cultural practices. And, conversely, the vision of the world that these narratives, imaginaries, and cultural practices return to us conditions the way we inhabit the territory and modify its landscape.

Les Cabasses is, therefore, a space to rehearse situated cultural practices and produce and circulate imaginaries and narratives that help us to better understand the relationships and systemic processes that traverse and configure the territory, while allowing us to build a social and solidarity economy and a good life, as we said, respectful of people and the environment.

Among the creation and research processes that have already begun or will be launched soon are spaces for practice, research, and collective construction around political cuisine (in collaboration with the artist Marina Monsonís and vegetable fibers (in collaboration with the artisan Mònica Guilera ), the practice and dissemination of bee culture and sustainable beekeeping (in collaboration with the association Zuhari ), bioconstruction interventions for the conditioning of the Les Cabasses infrastructures (in collaboration with Michele Pecoraro, promoter of the nosolopaja project), or a future self-training group on political ecology, the concept of capitalocene, and the temporal and spatial arrangements of capitalism in the Llobregat delta itself.

Les Cabasses is owned by LaFundició. We consider its acquisition as a political action that has the deliberate objective of rescuing land from the speculative land market and the hoarding of land for monoculture that threaten the future of agricultural activity in the Llobregat delta and hinder access to land for young farmers and, therefore, the generational change of the farming community. The farm is cultivated under a usufruct agreement by Jonas Abreu, promoter of the organic farming project L’hort de l’eriçó .