The Return of the Hunter's Antlers

List of Ingredients

Sculpture: Wood covered in clay, Almeria’s Almonds Trees

Performance: Body, Wood covered in clay, Walk Through Almeria's Hills and Barrancos

Day 10 - Field trip : The Clayed Pine Antlers and Almeria’s Almonds

A new specimen has been found

An eroding yet stubborn form of resilient and wandering life has erected from the ground of clay.

Sometimes it believes to be a tree, sometimes it is game. Its confusion is a wonderful gift, for it doesn't know which trail to identify with.

It is free to wander through fields or woods, speak different languages and love many homes.

Day 7 - Circling Boars : Encounters and Separations

At the autumn of the day

I walk through mountains towards the sunset, on boars territory, sniffing their air, smelling their hair, their wild skin. I look out for them, but somehow I’m looking for them too. I want to see and not be seen. I keep my eyes and ears out. Boars reign over the several peaks of the mountains surrounding our valley. On the top, where you can watch the early sunrise and embrace with your pupils what feels like thousands of kilometers, cliffs rise in a perfect vertical spring of rocks, surrounded by a wall of strong boar scent, a fortress of solid and invisible ramparts. Ancient human made circles of stones silently lay by the side of their castle, a hunter’s hiding. The territory is not mine.

I smell the sweat around my face, from my hair, a sweet smell of childhood. I remember being five and holding my baby brother drenched from the warm summer evening. A sweet and thick scent, flowers fermenting into ambrosial sirup, seeking to be held.

Sometimes I can smell it coming from me. I like to think it’s in our blood, a fraternal scent.

When I walk the mountains fearing a second encounter with the regal creatures, I wonder if they can smell me, my fear, or my joy.

I imagined being covered in dirt, waiting in the stone circle for a herd to come back home, I am trying to see them, feel and smell their presence.

There is no middle ground or taming. They sound like visitors from the underworld. I’ve heard them for a second time today as I was walking across the eroding cliffs of clay. I was holding a piece of wood I had found and taken with me for a sculpture. It is shaped like two long antlers. It reminds me of union and separation, encounters and heartbreaks, attachment and defensiveness, holding and keeping at large. I fell in love with it the second I laid my eyes on it. It was like recognizing a friend, met in a dream, who knows my heart, a close ally that will never fail. The piece is quite large and odd to carry around. When I ran from the boars, I felt like a vulnerable flailing creature, a small fleshy new born to the wild, a naked forest baby that has grown horns before knowing how to use them. So I ran and slipped on my left hip for the third time today. I could smell the sweet fraternal scent around my face, and see the boars footsteps on the wet ground of clay. My father used to take my brother and I track animals in the woods. Today I was playing the hunted hunter, holding a new friend and old memories, smelling like sweet home in an un-familiar family of crumbling ravins, eroding mountains and cackling pines. The heart doesn’t break here, it only slows, accelerates or stops.