Thread by @AGogortza

This is the story of an oak forest, right from where it’s born. The story of a landscape. It’s a long thread, but think about this first: The oaks that I’ll show you here might even live to be over 200 years old. Got 10 minutes? #2020forest

It was the Autumn of 2019, the last autumn before the pandemic. But at that time we we didn’t really know it. I got my bike and crossed the border at Ibardin, then making my way down the mountain pass towards Urruña, in the french part of the Basque Country.

My idea was to get to Biriatu, then continuing up the Bidasoa river to get back to Bera, my village.

I do that ride very often, ‘cause there aren’t a lot of cars on those roads, it’s got gorgeous landscapes, and you’ve gotta cross the spanish/french border twice. ‘cause you must gotta cross the border as much as possible.

The most beautiful part of the ride could be Tomaseneko bidea, in Urruña. Those 2 beautiful oaks show up right there. They dominate all the landscape. I always admired them on my way by.

But that time it was different. That time I stopped. Acorns were strewn along both sides of the road, and I thought, “I could pick up a few of them.” It was automatic, bend down, grab two or three and put them in my riding-shirt pocket.

That automatic reaction turned something on in my head, by the time I got home, I’d made at least a couple of decisions. First, to plant the acorns and see how they grow. Second, get some more acorns. I thought it, and did it. By the end of 2019 I’d planted 100 acorns.

That’s how my year went and 2020 came along. We all remember what we were doing at the beginning of the year as the rumours of the pandemic started getting louder and louder, until they became the only news.

All of the sudden, we’re confined, unable to go outside and provisionally prone to contemplation. This here’s what we could see from our house.

We went back to our almost-forgotten home traditions in lots of houses. Among others, reading the morning paper in its hard-copy-print version. For sure, it was a double pleasure. One, we were able to get out to buy it, and two reading it calmly back at home.

The deal is, with all those days at home, all those acorns I’d practically forgotten about started sprouting one-by-one. Out of the blue. I was jazzed up, watching how an oak is born and grows, day by day.

Seeing that work-social life stopped or at least slowed down, I had all the time I wanted to be watching them. Then, as playing, I started naming each new oak that was born.

If we give names to people, I thought to myself, how could we not name a tree that’s gonna live 5 times longer than us? So, I started thinking up names that would be appropriate for trees while I read the newspaper.

A lot of those names were unavoidably linked to the pandemic: Wuhan, Pangolin, Covid-19, Mers…
Once an oak was baptised, taking a sheet of the newspaper to dress it up and get this shot of it as a welcoming celebration.

Finally, to be able to tell them apart, I had to put their names on a clothes-pin. Here are some of them all dressed up for their baptism photos.

Some artists we lost those days were turned into trees like: Little Richard, Zumeta, Ulibarrena…

I named some of them with toponyms like: Tripoli, Congo, New Delhi, Ararat...

Some other names weren't closely linked to the news, but i read those words somewhere on the newspaper: Doraemon, Oihame, Kaiobeltza, Tartaruga… Don’t tell me those aren’t beautiful names for a tree.

And I kept going on ‘till I’d baptised them all: Benjamin, Pantxika, Trump, Goliath, Mao, Gernika, Stilinovic, Tutsi, Netanyahu, Klein, Cabezafuego, Varoufakis, Laboa, Steinem…

It was a fun activity, starting from something as transient as a newspaper and ending up giving a name to tree that could live hundreds of years. That’s the place where the seconds and the centuries cross paths, without a doubt.

When these trees are planted, they’ll have been witness to the confinement, they have the pandemic times in their roots, the pandemic that’ll surely leave its mark on the long decade to come.

Meanwhile, as photo material trees are perfect for me. Here are some images from the first photo-shoot.

Summer of 2020 gave way to winter, and the newly-sprouted plants started dropping their first leaves. Trees don’t actually lose their leaves, they drop them willingly. If the leaves froze while still on the tree, that would harm the whole tree. That’s why they drop their leaves.

It’s weird, but one could say that has something like a light-meter in their bodies, and according to the amount of light it receives, it knows when Winter’s here, or Spring’s on its way… and thus, they give a different physiological response to each season.

This process is called Photoperiodism. I used that process as an inspiration to do a photo project some years ago. I buried some homemade cameras in the forest, looking up at the branches of the trees.

Without moving the camera from its place, I performed a double exposure, the first in Winter and the second 6-8 months afterwards, in the middle of Summer.

After each exposure, I gathered up my camera and headed to the lab to develop the negatives. Breaking the time-line, the synthesis of 6 months of time are found in these photos. #photoperiodism

But lets get back to the story. As we’ve said, our young oaks made it through Winter, even though there were a few who just weren’t able to make it through the harsh Winter. In Spring I had 100 oaks, and after Winter about 60. Here are a few who didn’t make it.

During that time I got in touch with the Bera Municipality to talk about this project. I asked them if I could plant some of the oaks on Municipal land. Yes, was the answer and they said to pick a place.

So, I chose this place between Bera and Urruña along the border at the foot of Erentzu mountain. It’s a pretty interesting little place where lots of different mountain paths converge, and it has priceless vistas.

Being on the border meant forcing two towns to work together since they are under admistration of 2 different countries, Spain and France. We set an appointment in the Urruña town hall to meet each other and discuss the project.

I proposed planting the oaks in 2 circles, with half of each circle on each side of the border. This oak wood would have an artistic vocation from the start: Working on the concepts of region, landscape and time as its reason for being.

The Urruña town hall was also quite open to the project and the next step was meeting at the planting-site land with Bera's and Urruña’s mayor, the two mountain dept. representatives and the rangers. That was in September of 2021.

In the picture, from left to right: Manaus, Merkel, Schengen, Nere, Sontag, Zubieta…
And behind them are the Bera and Urruña town representatives.

The rangers advised planting in Winter, and if possible, after a 2-week rainy period. Autumn went by pretty dry, but at the end of November it started raining and didn’t stop. The Bidasoa river even overflowed.

Last week we finally came out of the fog and got the OK for the day to plant. December 21st was the day, The Winter Solstice.

The rangers from Bera and Urruña: Urtzi, Vincent, Baptiste and Yoan.

On the big day, we went to dig holes, where I’d marked them out. So we started with shovels and picks and what had seemed to be soft ground quickly turned into holes with lots of stones, the deeper, the bigger.

I’d found a 50 by 80cm flat stone buried there. I couldn’t believe it.

We got it out and laid it on the ground to get a better look. There was no doubt that it was hand-worked stone, but who knows why and since when that stone’s been buried there.

Since there are megaliths in the area, I decided to find somebody who knows a lot about gravestones, and a friend got me in touch with Luis Millan. He came to look that afternoon and I showed him the place.

Hand-worked stone, yes, but he couldn’t be sure what its use was. What the heck is this rock?

The stone was an unexpected surprise, we’ll see if it goes anywhere. It didn’t hold us back, the next day we came back up to the planting-site.

One by one 27 oaks were put into the ground and we put a protective screen around each one. Here you have some of those little oaks, already standing up straight in place. #Klein #Congo #Trump #Ulibarrena

As said before, the oaks were planted in 2 circles, in the big one 17 oaks and in the little one 10.

You can’t see it in the picture, but the international border passes through the middle of each circle. Now, however, a new space has been created on top of it. In fact, both territories and landscapes aren’t just born, we make them, change them, destroy them…

For the moment this trip has taken us from a few acorns picked up in 2019 to where we are right now. From here on, who knows how the 2020 oak wood will fare? Will they even survive this winter? Or will they live for 500 years?

There will be other surprises along the way, that’s for sure. Maybe next December I’ll tell you how the oaks at the foot of Erentzu mountain came along. Thank you if you’ve read all the way to here. And Happy New Year!