"Making Life: Conversation between Cultivating Bodies"
Summer is back, and at the gates of August, EiMA is back. The performing arts festival that Maria Antònia Oliver and a wonderful team of people have made possible for 10 years—Maria de la Salut. The essence: culture and rurality, questioned, observed, intervened, enriched through sincerity, firm commitment, honesty, collective inquiry, listening, radicalism, provocation, and assuming the risk that all this entails in the world and times we live in.
A proposal that, if you let it, moves through you and questions you, makes you uncomfortable if necessary, and transforms you, transforming how it transforms the way we look at the territory from the bodies that inhabit it, sometimes disconnected, dislocated, without touching the ground, without embracing the materiality, the earth.
This Wednesday evening, EiMA made us a proposal: a space for conversation, an evening without clocks, from the simplicity of sharing a space around a table, nourished by the witnesses, experiences, concerns, and experiences of people who—from different corners and from the corners connected to the land, from memories, from yearnings—were invited or felt called by the proposal: "Making Life: Conversation between Bodies that Cultivate" was above all an evening shared outdoors. In Deulosal, where almost all of EiMA materializes its proposal, year after year. A silent, still, and beautiful field that welcomes us every year, far from the maelstrom of Mallorca driven mad by the tourist onslaught. A corner, a refuge, a memory, a possibility. Far from romanticizing, we embark on a conversation around the essential whys: what drives us to continue working the land, and the bodies from the land, what is it that sustains us when the world around us seems to want to destroy the few lives that resist it, as it resists from small spaces and projects, from individual lives, from individual ties, from community ties.
A conversation where, starting from shared stories, knowledge and coincidences, the origins of the connection to the field, to the land, to the territory emerged, and a long conversation about what makes us stay and resist, about pleasure, coherence, the joy of maintaining it in the midst of all difficulties, about strength and about the strength of a thousand and one difficulties, about the rages contained and those expressed, those that mobilize us and make us continue, about the collective intelligence that responds to what individuality alone cannot face, about values, ties. About work, effort, commitment, and loyalty, especially to oneself, which are the reason for your determination to continue, to charge forward, to never let go. About the enjoyment and meaning this gives to life, despite the lack of recognition and devaluation by a world in which what is truly essential, what truly nourishes us, body and soul, is relegated to the margins. About how it is from these margins that all the potential to be able to charge forward again comes.
And after all, what would be the question? To return, to redirect, to reconquer, to reproduce, to revive, to resist, to resume, to reintroduce, to rethink, to revert, to revive, to survive... To sow, to harvest, to germinate, to cultivate, to take root, to flourish, to graft... Surely all these words, and more, could write the common story of the strength of connection, the earth that sustains us, the story that explains the most essential why, that which fuels hope, possibility, desire, and the certainty that we are not yet completely lost, despite the barbarity that surrounds us.
These fleeting but slow encounters are also a way of being, of building community, of recognizing and reminding ourselves why we continue. They are acts of poetic and political resistance, spaces in which words once again have weight, time expands, and where culture ceases to be a spectacle to become root, connection, a vital necessity. Perhaps this is where EiMA's most revolutionary strength lies: in making the artistic gesture a tool for transformation, in proposing that art not only be seen, but inhabited, embodied in other bodies, buried in the earth, and sprouting forth in the form of connection, reflection, and shared life. Thus, EiMA is not just a festival: it's a way of seeing and being in the world. And this, today, is more necessary than ever.
