An Emerging Utopía: La Colonia, Nueva Oportunidad

Set in the university garden of La Facultad de Bellas Artes in Madrid, New Opportunity-The Colony, is an ephemeral agro-ecological artist community that radically reinvents and challenges the boundaries between art, aesthetics, agriculture, and social ecology, creating a space for the synergy of diverse knowledge and communal living practices, and nurturing a profound trust in creative power. 

This project is one of many manifestations by artist and agroecology activist Fernando Garcia-Dory. The Colony, through exemplary living practices, encourages the importance of kinesthetic learning and radical pedagogy by experimenting with self-organization, sociology, and collective agency that is inspired by spiritually and ideologically based intentional communities. 

In a global climate of scarcity and socio-ecological turbulence, The Colony dares to introduce a new ethic. They’ve modeled a space that fosters aesthetic contemplation for ecological revitalization. Not only does the community exemplify the fundamental qualities of socially engaged art practice, it creates profoundly unique opportunities, stewarding a utopia. 

Garcia-Dory found that the project’s structure could begin to settle a series of, what he refers to as “pending dues”; the debtor being the capitalist structure it’s neglect of sustainability and resource renewability and how that has resulted in the stagnation of energetic flow. This concept finds its origins in the laws of thermodynamics, and references Alfred J. Lotka’s own law of maximum entropy. Participants figured that through forming social communities, creating informal sharing economies, and engaging with natural organic systems, they could redistribute and incrementally increase the entropy that was disturbed by capitalism, accumulation, scarcity, and commodification. The community actively engages with the question “Are there collective fountains and flows of energy existing amongst the human species that can circulate openly through joint action in a social community?

The collective engages with this perspective firstly by reckoning with our wicked problems, challenging the ideology, ontology, and morals and values of Colonial Western society and how they inform our relationship to our ecosystem and our economies. 

In a group setting they reflect on the evolution of the concept of nature within our dominant society, challenging the very notion of landscape and the conditioned bias according to which humanity considers itself both external and superior to an objectified perception of nature. In doing so, they are able to disavow the illusion of control, and begin to explore what it means to be within this space with more theoretical and aesthetic nuance as a mass conglomerate of interdependent beings 

a host of companions in sympoietic threading, felting, tangling, tracking, and sorting as muddle (Donna Haraway) 

In return they advocate for the importance of new agricultural aesthetics and speculative practices to rethink the place and role of humanity within the ecosystem and empower new approaches in art that critically contribute to the development of sustainable interaction with the environment.

The participants that belong to the collective can have their needs covered by the structure itself. They’re afforded the opportunity to take care of their nourishment and grow their own food, collectively managing food preserves. This is preceded by soil analysis of the land, and sustainable biological pest control that remains mindful of biopiracy. Participants also collaborate to design eccentric sustainable multipurpose furniture, architecture such as greenhouses and garden mandalas. 

During the farming season, the gathered group of students built an outdoor classroom and laboratory, to facilitate a program of meetings, workshops and moments for discussion and action, amongst themselves and with teachers and non-teaching staff about visions and uses of space, cultivation and use of land in the gardens, utility in the arts, applied agroecology all over a collective meals. 

This intergenerational interchanging of ideas, exercises the kind of radical pedagogy described by Paulo Freire.The community was able to gather and engage botanists with activists and artists, philosophers with chemists, exploring interstices within the community. Introducing different disciplines allows the community to analyze agroecology from a broad range of perspectives, synthasizing geography, archeology, post-colonial studies, and even queer theory. The end result being an incredible exchange of knowledge and wisdom, active exercising of critical consciousness, profound reflection of the world that allows them to apprehend it. 

To borrow Mary Mattingly 's terms, we are moving through a violent social order and processing our collective trauma which stunted our imaginations and our sense of what is possible. New Opportunity-The Colony is a particularly fitting name for a group that has so enthusiastically taken on the task of sitting with the troubles of our times, revisiting debates that are at the heart of our ecological and ideological crisis. In observing previous forms of communal living and collective life, land-based sharing economies, participants were able to design a community that transcends the discursive aspects of activism and metamorphosizes that spirit into praxis. 

(CG)

Sources: 

Juan Canela, “Throw a Rock and See What Happens.” Fernando García-Dory Nueva Oportunidad. La Colonia, edited by Fernando Garcia-Dory (Fundación Especial Caja Madrid, 2011), pp. 45–49. 

“New Opportunity- the Colony : Fernando García-Dory.” Fernando Garcia-Dory, 2012, www.fernandogarciadory.info/index.php?/projects/new-opportunity--the-colony.