RS3: Alentejo Research Unit / Liquid Deserts Studio

Liquid Deserts investigates the environmental transformation taking place in Alentejo. This rural region in the south of Portugal, where modes of life are deeply rooted in human-soil relations, provides a lens to unpack the entangled relation between the ongoing desertification of the western Mediterranean basin and the expansion of mono-crop agriculture. Focusing on the environmental disputes surrounding water access in Alentejo, we will explore the inherent contradictions of the so-called European Green Deal, namely the conflict between the modernisation of agricultural practices and the protection of habitats and landscapes. We will make use of the tools and methods of environmental architecture to trace the different scales of extractivism at stake – resource exhaustion, environmental contamination, exploitation of migrant labour – and research and design alternatives to the extractive model of monocrop.

Our goal is to engage with the ongoing ecological, social, and political struggles taking place in the region, while learning from the different modes of knowledge and situated perspectives of local stakeholders: farmers and exploited rural workers; scientists and architects; affected populations and activists. Combining architectural tools of spatial analysis with the voices and claims of those inhabiting the frontline of desertification, and in collaboration with local activist movements and experimental practices, the studio aims at producing a meaningful contribution to new forms of resistance and adaptation, above and below ground.

Adaptive Interventions

As the systemic enrolling of mono-culture landscapes is embedding itself as the economic norm within a dramatically changing climate and ecological make-up, varying forms of adaptation are emerging in the Alentejo. This occurs within alternative agro-ecological modes of production and permaculture systems in the region, or within different economic strategies for food, water and even energy (resource) distribution that demand wholly different labour relations to the extractive ones that are currently administered.

Building upon our investigation on the environmental impacts of the Alqueva dam, our focus in the third year of the studio shifts towards adaptation and how it manifests across various scales and temporalities in the region. Understanding adaptation as a process of change in relation to surrounding biological, socio-economic, and geopolitical conditions will foster a focus on alternative agricultural, socio-economic and ecosystemic relationships across the studio and the communities working within the region. Throughout Alentejo, where increasing aridity, drought, intensive agricultural expansion, and soil exhaustion are being felt, how do communities first encounter shared matters of concern, and collectively work together to oppose or live best with ongoing change? By engaging directly with the divergent practices of cooperativism, agro-ecology, activism, and science, the studio will focus on how adaptation in the region is being practised and conceptualised across various modes of collective interaction.

The emphasis in the first term will be to develop practices of divergent listening as a method and attention-making process to understand the complexities and polyphonic registers of socio-ecological and economic relations and how they are changing. We will interrogate adaptation from these vantage points, by centring a shift away from the quantification of presence (i.e. of a species, of a condition): how does paying attention to various modalities of adaptation provide a means to understand biodiversity/economic/social change – how, for instance, do nature-culture communities undergo processes of living-with change and how and where must adaptation occur – as a form of critical response.

Simultaneously, how are more-than-human worlds and biodiversity that inhabit the Alentejo region affected by the dramatic increases in industrialised and intensive agricultural practices? How do they (and the processes they rely upon) get valued and accounted for within current and critical understandings of “Nature” and “Culture”, and how can listening to more-than-human worlds open up alternative forms of resistance? By considering these questions through forms of expanded listening and sensing practices, how can ecological accountability manifest and what forms and through what practices of care might it take?

Upon completion in 2002, the closing of the Alqueva dam’s floodgates generated the largest artificial water reservoir in Europe, radically altering the semi-arid landscape. In the aftermath of the flooding, it is estimated that over 1 million trees were felled, including many protected areas of Montado ecosystem. But the arrival of the water also led to an increase in chemical inputs, placing the entire ecology of the region under pressure. Not only a direct loss of biodiversity caused by rising toxicity levels, but also vernacular forms of production and empirical knowledge reliant on the foraging of non-cultivated species, labelled as weeds to be eradicated under so-called modern agricultural taxonomies and methods.

But the environmental crisis also triggered the emergence of organised struggle: from the long plains of Beja in lower Alentejo to the coastal region of Odemira, citizens, activists, and workers, protest the endless expansion of irrigated monocrop fields, greenhouses, and photovoltaic parks. Our studio will join them in denouncing the ongoing ecocide, while experimenting with environmental architecture as a tool for engaging in the design of critical alternatives, and ultimately as a medium of political resistance.

We will work across multiple mediums, combining analogue and digital mapping, listening practices and differing modes of sonic understanding, photography and moving images, physical and digital modelling. By engaging with Alentejo's ongoing ecological struggles, we aim to generate research and design outputs that can effectively be mobilised as tools for resistance and alternative adaptation.

In term 1, we will focus on the production of an Adaptation Manual. Through collaborative group work, and in collaboration with our local partners, we will probe various fields of research and concern, which inform their situated practices. The manual will collect from conversations and interaction with these different actors to construct a toolkit for intervention. Each group will focus upon a specific practice/partner to structure the research and locate points of intervention. By considering the fields of references and the conceptual orientations of each practice, the manual will provide a means to focus concern and provide avenues to expand out from through your critical engagement with the project.

During term 2 we continue a working relationship with the Provisional School for nothing, a pedagogical experiment for alternative artistic research and experimentation based in Sabóia, Alentejo. This partnership will accommodate for the sharing of research methods and experimental pedagogical approaches stemming from an artist context. We anticipate engaging ongoing research with the environmental concerns in the local area as well as with the organisation's existing partners, creating a space to bring together experts and partners to share and learn with.

During our field trip to Alentejo in February, we will be based at the school in Saboia for a

week-long Adaptation Workshop, where we will work collectively with our research partners on our ongoing Adaptation projects.

Building upon the existing collaborative research conducted from Terms 1 and 2, the Independent Research Project will be developed during the final term building towards a public presentation of work and thesis submission. Focus will be upon the conceptual framework of the project, as experimentation with aesthetic strategies to communicate the research to publics both here in the context of the RCA as well as crucially to the communities engaged in Alentejo. Work will be shared with partners and if possible we will seek opportunities to share and show work in Alentejo.

This year we are establishing working partnerships with a number of organisations and groups currently operating in Alentejo. Working groups will engage with these partners to understand their matters of concern, their modes of engagement and the political interventions they encounter.

MED

Mediterranean Institute for Agriculture, Environment, Development – University of Évora LABscape is an interdisciplinary research team focused on rural landscapes in the Mediterranean and their complex processes or change, from natural resources to human activities and communities.

While the original focus was on the Montado, we have also been exploring other important land-use systems, including olive groves, where a certain process of bi-polarisation is ongoing, with 2 main trends running in parallel; corporate intensification and farming re-territorialisation. This poses multiple challenges in terms of society, the environment and the economy, but also raises questions related to culture, identity and the landscape as a resource.

José Muñoz-Rojas is a lecturer and researcher at MED, PhD in Territorial Planning in Rural Mediterranean Landscapes.

Terrasintropica integrated agricultural production / Mertola

In one of the regions most affected by depopulation and desertification, Mertola finds itself in a socio-ecological labyrinth where various challenges cross paths. It is in this context that the Associacao Terra Sintropica seeks to test solutions, with a view to a more ecologically safe and socially just territory. Mertola is also a territory of resilience, an experience territory for new solutions, a Laboratory of the Future for the Agroecological Transition, through the concept of "regeneration through use."

Marta Cortegano, Forest Engineer, MA Management and Conservation of Natural Resources.

Pedro Nogueira, Landscape architect, coordinator of the CC Desert Project

Plant improvement station INIAV Instituto Nacional de Investigação Agraria e Veterinaria / Elvas

The Strategic Biotechnology and Genetic Resources Research and Services Unit at INIAV carries out studies that aim to improve the understanding of the relationships between plants and animals with the environment, in order to identify genetic combinations, reproduction mechanisms and technologies and selection/conservation strategies that more efficiently exploit available natural resources, particularly in Mediterranean regions and also contribute to improving the understanding of their behaviour in the face of scenarios of possible climate change.

Benvindo Maçãs, Director of the Research Unit of Biotechnology and Genetic Resources with Miguel Teodoro, Visual Artist, Eindhoven Design Academy

RS3 is led by João Prates Ruivo and George Ridgway