The Entre Serras Project (PES) is a network of contemporary art that focus on agriculture and biodiversity. It aims to create a psycho-cartographic network of art on mountains of Portugal, Spain, and France (Beira Baixa and Beira Alta, Extremadura and Castile and León regions, Alpes de Haute-Provence and Bouches du Rhône departments). PES was born on the Iberian Central Range, a chain of mountains that divide the Iberian Peninsula in two, irrespectively of the administrative borders that were superimposed on the natural territory. Mountains are naturally regions of low human density: their geography turns them difficult to inhabit and to be appropriated by intensive agriculture. They remain, by and large, living laboratories where nature is still at hand. Spaces where the relations between the urban and the rural may be clearer.
PES is a cultural, social, and scientific project that includes collaborative and transdisciplinary artistic actions, committed to communities. Working in situ (interventions in the territory) and in visu (visualization of photographic documentation and other media through exhibitions and a digital platform), artists are invited to deeply connect with the territory. In doing so, they highlight the stories of the places, as well as phenomena linked to the divides rural/urban and agriculture/biodiversity.
The PES partners’ consorcium intends, through collaboration with artists and audiences, to produce collective actions and art works that may remain outdoors or are further exhibited in events that aim to question how humans interact with their surroundings (physical and organic) in mountains.
For the communities, their envolvment in PES artistic actions is an opportunity to look at their own historical, social, anthropological and ecological reality through the artist’s eyes. At the end of the action there may be a physical art work, or a result that is lodged in the participant’s memory, an experience that may have changed him/her, a narrative to be further transmitted.
PES has been in the field uninterruptedly since 2017.
