Casa do Río is a public area for the preservation of biodiversity belonging to the Council of Palas de Rei, Lugo. It is a recreational area dedicated to the preservation of the riparian forest. A food forest has been planted with which we are not only taking care of the environment but also promoting life and diversity. Since it is a place open to the public, its spirit is to serve as a model of good practices in nature. A Casa do Río is also a safe space for the LGBTIQ+ collective, where people from all over the world and from different cultures, genders and sexual orientations have already stayed and worked at, getting to learn very valuable tools of self-sustainability for life in the countryside. We have been focused on the collective creation of a Bio.Art.laboratory for the study of nature in which critical thinking is encouraged through case study of biology practices. This laboratory emerges from the interaction of feminist ecology, the work with Free and Open Source technologies and the access to open and queer science. The main objective is the collective improvement of skills for sustainable living in rural areas. We have also been a receiving entity of the European Solidarity Corps, welcoming young people (between 18 and 30 years old) to do voluntary work with us with a program called Aturuxo: The Sound of Joy, which was a music, traditional dance and agriculture exchange project.
Recent accomplishments: A Casa do Río is actually taking part on a regional project called AlderMos which is developing a complete educational program that merges Art & Science from a Feminist narrative. The Aldearmos program emerges from the need to promote and support participatory processes made up of local agents of the rural communities with the purpose of strengthening the reactivation of cultural networks and the settlement of a young active population. It has three active nodes : Itinerancias (Artist itineraries), Aldear na escola, (education in rural areas) and Patrimony. The Artist and Educator Paula Pin designed and executed a program called Rural BioArtLab to seek the promotion of more sustainable models of life in rural areas or regarding identity re-connection. We are honestly aware that there is a need to reconnect people with nature and a more sustainable life. This proposal is transversally linked to environmental education, as well as issues of gender and diversity and open and free culture. The rural laboratory sets in motion a transdisciplinary feminist pedagogy for the value or role of natural sciences in the rural context. In order to create a laboratory context that, through practical processes of open science, trains people to face the ecological challenges. Biotranslab from Paula Pin from Casa do Río and The Foundry established a collaboration to run the event Eco-Logic Queer Energy harvesting. The project is possible thanks to the support of GOSH, a network for developing and disseminating projects based on Open Source hardware for Science. Eco-Logic Queer Energy harvesting: The event aims at addressing the lack of women, queer, trans and diversity in technological fields in general and hacking more specifically. But even more so, it aims at creating a community that critically assesses the hegemonic narratives around technologies, the modernity aspects of underlying Western assumptions related to them, and their inherent capitalist inflections, among others. The main purpose of this event is to develop kits that focus on interacting with the natural environment in the field of energy. The main objective lies in harvesting energy of the natural environment using small wind turbines. These power kits will be scalable and can be used both as pedagogical material and to set up site-specific power plants in different sites as well. There is a counter-infrastructural component to this work: one possible consequence would be to emancipate people to generate their own energy instead of relying on large and often extractive companies.
A Casa Do Rio links:
Contact:
e-mail: acasadorio.arte@gmail.com
phone: +34 653820444