The case study Territorio Abadía Retuerta of the Year Zero of Organismo independent study program took as its study object the ecological context in which the abbey of Santa María de Retuerta sits—today a vineyard and hotel under the name of Abadía Retuerta—located on the banks of the Duero river in the northern Castilian Plateau of the Iberian Peninsula.

During the research process, the case study team was moved by an interest in exploring the landscape and the limits of its representation by engaging with the temporal dimension of maps, as well as the role of time in shaping landscapes. The research focused on the word territorio (territory), imagined as a complex system of traces, trips, flows, migrations, rivers, roots, and paths that crossed different temporalities, shaping what we see—or do not see—today. In this sense, the research aimed to unearth the invisible relationships that lie under the surface of the map while making reference to the historical dimension of the territory, in its successive historical layers: from the pre-Roman inhabitants to the monks who built the abbey as part of the colonization process, to end up with its current state dedicated to viticulture, and its immediate ecological future. 

The case study group worked mainly through listening and sound as a way of exploring the territory, an orientation tool that allowed paying attention to the communities, human and non-human, that inhabit and pass through it. Hence, soundscaping was understood as a means to challenge the abstracted physicality of borders while allowing the imagination of the landscape as a system of overlaps, echoes and reverberations. Recording sounds is a way to gather traces, auditive vestiges that symbolize the presence of an absence, making us reconnect with another temporal dimension, and reflect on the difference of the traces that we leave by moving and the ones we leave by staying. 

The study trip itself was conceived as a tool to learn and unlearn the landscape from the perception of the wanderer and the listener. A walking and hearing exploration of Abadía Retuerta and its surroundings, from the abbey to the vineyards, the orchard, the garden, the forest, the river and its channel, as well as the villages nearby, constituted the unfolding of the journey. The visit to the Vaccean archaeological site of Pintia gave a sense of deep time in the recurrent use of the land, translated into material memory: clay marbles, zoomorphic boxes and rattles were heard and recorded to connect to that distant past. Listening was equally the way to link to the communities that currently inhabit the territory, from the villagers of the area, witnesses of its recent past, to the workers of Abadía Retuerta who cultivate the land, or the young people that advocate for different futures for the region. And of course, listening was a way to access the more-than-human: the croaking of the storks, the buzzing of the bees, the riverine sounds of the flowing water, or the exhaustive repetition of the scops owl. The culmination of this listening process resulted in the soundscape presented in this platform. 

Throughout the research process, the case study team worked with different interdisciplinary guest experts, which allowed them to explore the territory through different lenses: curator Chus Martínez approached the potentialities of the site through the invitation to nomadic ephemeral activities, taking fantasy as a form of research; political geographer Louise Carver alluded to notions of bourgeois environmentalism and the tensions of the private and the public in this type of ecological contexts; forestry engineer Santiago Saura Martínez de Toda tackled issues such as animal and vegetal migrations, extinction debts or green highways; artist Paula García-Masedo, referred to the forms of knowledge of a landscape that can be obtained through walking it, enhancing personal-ecological relations; and finally, the research collective Nomad Garden offered tools on non-material modes of interaction with the territory—sound, smell, multimedia, archiving—as laboratories for dialogue between species. 

Acknowledgments to the facilitator of the case, Abadía Retuerta, and all its team that has made the project possible, including Enrique Valero, Fernando Lázaro, and Inés Munozcano, as well as many other interlocutors from Abadía Retuerta during case study trip including, Leonor Serrano Rivas, Roberto Nieto, Chisco Hernández, Víctor Frechilla, Luis Carlos de la Calle, Julio Sierra, and Ramón García. Gratitude/thank you also to the aforementioned guest experts that have generously taken part in the research process, as well as to Atelier itd in the support of the case study.