refugi gallina pelada 15 JUL 2011

2 AUG 2011

wind catchers

.. you wake up after a dream. You're back in London, lying on your back, in the hour before daybreak. It's hot. Your ears, freshly transplanted, follow one plane after another in an unbroken stream. Passengers in those planes look down : they see The River turning at Greenwich, The London Eye, upstream along the buildings of Westminster - meanwhile, the first passengers are already arriving in the warm city [.. emerging like Wallinger/Agamben angels from Arrivals.. ]

[Insert: video: mushroom basket]

A person recently returned continues of course to be inhabited by images and sounds from their vacation - phonomnesis. Sound memories are encoded so that they can be played back in memory without physically reproducing the sounds themselves. A person lies listening to the sounds of animals bells in the coll on the way to the summit of the Gallina Pelada (skinned chicken) - a peak in the vicinity of the taller and more famous Pedraforca - the Stone Fork.

In the coll you found the refugi and went towards it. A closed house is evident as you walk towards it, in fact as in a dream: no whisp of smoke; no livestock guardian dog that gets to its feet; no whittled crook leaning by the well. A note on the heavy bolted dark wood door gave a number to call, but not today. On vacation, you are out of kilter with the working week. You turned away from the door and went to sit by the many troughs, filled by a trickling spring. As often in these areas, it is quiet and still, but you are aware of intense seasonal activities: from time to time large herds of animals come down from the mountains: shaggy cattle, sheep, semi wild horses; while at other times wild mountain animals - such as Isards - come to the troughs. You're sitting near the troughs on a small turf ledge, created by the backs of animals sheltering from the wind, that sweeps constantly over the coll

By the time you reached the peak it was in thick cloud. you took out a visitor's book from an iron box brazed to a post, and used the biro to write *we can't see anything*

The unseasonal rain brought the mushrooms out early. *Crecen mucho* said the baker at Pobla de Lillet, putting loaves and biscuits into bags: her brothers were in the mountains as we were speaking, she said, surrounded by jars of mushrooms on the shelves. That was lower down.

Up on the mountain meadows we found what we took for puffballs - white and rounded like meringues. They smelled great but they ruined the stew. I looked them up and found they were no good to eat. The local name is pets de llops - wolf farts

[Insert: image: pets de llops]

cp: cantallops - wolf songs - for chanterelles

Planes go over constantly and the woodpigeons call

[Insert: approach of planes to Heathrow International over Ruskin Park area]

[Insert audio: cambria road]

*You wouldn't know you were a techie* Tania Ketenjian was laughing, *looking at your site* - because I do it myself, said Bill Fontana - who pioneered live streams from the sites of the landings on the Normandy coast to the traffic island at the Arc de Triomphe - and the famous thing with the telephone and the Mona Lisa..

.. tits planes you rode your bikes to the Green Dale field:

Dulwich Hamlets Football club propose to turn the whole area into astroturf pitches. The area, as they see it, is unused. There are other forms of recreation, said Jenny Jones (Green) : walking across a field?

The blackberry bushes are piled up the hill at Green Dale with the thistles and vetches: it's a spectral riverine landscape by where the Effra runs underground. You picked 5 kilos or so from the tall bushes : in masses there in the sun : the four of you, this (that) summer..

[Insert: link: jam / goldsmiths jam]

Just there the rain began : a few drops, then steadily - drenching, you think, the berries and the many moths and butterflies down in the grasses ..

[Insert: link: rain - Tinguely]

All the time you were in the mountains around Berga, S was waiting to come back and get chickens. That was S's abiding concern and sustaining obsession, at that time.

[Insert: image: chicken with S]

You painted the chicken house red.

There was one man: small looking
against one of those huge mounds of blackberry bushes.
You remember somebody talking about the way people looked against the Stella paintings at the Whitechapel: those big Stella paintings make people look great: standing there: although they're small

He left as you arrived. You stood there in the hot sun with the racemes of berries around and above, thinking of Ponge

There was nobody else there

By the time you got to making jelly it was the middle of the night

P was talking about Adam Bede : how they know how to make everything: jams and jellies and butters. How George Eliot wrote a novel a year and translated Feuerbach and Spinoza. You were cooking spaghetti.

The rain came over now it's running in the gutters and channels you can hear it dripping on the leaves. The mountains were full of wild flowers after the early rains - you went in to Berga. The film in the orientation point in Berga left out the twentieth century: it jumped straight from the Carlist revolt to now.

Half way down the Passeig de l'Industria you went into an agricultural supplier. You bought a belt a basket a hand hoe and a hatchet.

[Insert hatchet scan]