Marta Nieto Romero

Documentary: Sitting on Marão Mountains

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This video-documentary is the result of the project Marão Minha Serra, an action-research project aiming at promoting  more sustainable human-nature relations (see facebook page). The project aimed at re-connecting people to each other and to their forested common land to re-build communities (human and more-than-human). For that, the project recorded residents telling stories about their common land and asked them to choose a meaningful place for their life telling the story behind it. Thus, this video is an affective map of the baldio of Ansiães, a map that tells the past and current resident’s affects towards their common land.

Cheap land available in Portugal: commoning or exclusion?

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By Marta Nieto Romero (in collaboration with Alessandro Vasta) The other day I had an interesting conversation with my colleague Alessandro Vasta touching on the issue of Northern Europeans buying land in Portugal to set up sustainable projects. It made me think a lot on why am I suspicious about it, and we made interesting … Read more

Managing forests collectively in Galicia

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Do you know what happened to historical commonlands in Europe? Before the 18th century many of our rural areas where managed directly by communities. Today, many of these historical commonlands have been taken by the state, are privatised or abandoned. To show what’s happening in a community in Galicia, Spain, I made a short video (above). … Read more

A trip across Galician territory: building the rural and the commons

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By Marta Nieto Romero On the 26th of November I attended a collective hike in Galicia (North West Spain). Organized by the Commons Study Program they invited members of Ergosfera, an association of architects, who guided us in an amazing trip throughout the rural space of Galicia under the lenses of: Commons, Feminism and Rurality. … Read more

“Common-tryside”: revitalising the Portuguese countryside through commoning forests

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By Marta Nieto Romero “Para lá de Marão, mandam os que lá estão”- “At the other side of Marão, govern those who are there” (traditional Portuguese saying) Last week, Elisabete, Sandra and me crossed the recently inaugurated tunnel of Marão to meet with BALADI, the national federation of common lands of Portugal which is located … Read more