SONGS OF NEARBY EARTH (SONE)

In 1974, the average temperature in Jerez de la Frontera was 16.9ºC. In 2024, it was 2ºC higher. It would have been 4ºC higher if we had taken the average maximum temperatures as a reference.

In this context of global warming, SONE explores local climate adaptation strategies by intertwining landscaping practices such as urban vineyards with traditional rituals such as zambombas. These are two seemingly unrelated processes, but they are materially linked through the vines which, pruned at the end of autumn, feed the fires around which these popular festivals are celebrated with their shoots.

Within this framework, the project explores the capacity of collective rituals to drive urban renaturalisation processes. Thus, rather than developing generic solutions, this initiative focuses on the combination of local knowledge and practices that enable us to collectively renew our relationship with the landscape.

With this objective in mind, this exhibition brings together agents, resources and knowledge from Jerez which, when realigned, remind us that climate adaptation does not only involve the adoption of new technologies, but also the reactivation of the aesthetic, symbolic and vital potential of the landscapes we inhabit.

0. TOTEMS

Based on Estelle Jullian's (Culturama) intuition that the Jerez bioregion is revealed behind the materiality of the zambomba, this project explores the use of local resources in its manufacture.

This process has resulted in a series of glazed ceramic pieces whose height represents the geological periods in which the materials used to glaze them accumulated, while their profile reflects the evolution of temperatures throughout those periods.

The pieces glazed with albariza clay refer to the Miocene, when Jerez was a shallow sea at the bottom of which the skeletons of tiny microorganisms such as diatoms and radiolarians precipitated. The following pieces correspond to the Holocene, evoking the expansion of vines in the Guadalete valley, and have been glazed with ashes from Palomino and Pedro Ximénez vine shoots mixed with albariza clay. The pieces dedicated to the Anthropocene are divided into two possible scenarios: a dark version, representing the predicted rise in temperatures, is covered with a mixture of albariza, vine shoots and metals such as iron oxides, which have been very present since the industrial revolution. The other, brighter version alludes to a desirable decrease in temperature and CO2 and has been glazed with albariza clay, vine shoots and decreasing amounts of metals linked to energy storage, such as lithium and zinc.

In total, more than 120 pots have been made following these guidelines and distributed throughout the Palacio Riquelme, conceived as a quarry of pieces that, after the exhibition, will be reused as zambombas (traditional Christmas drums) or protectors for new urban vineyards.

1. INVOCATION

Originally, zambombas emerged as instruments for connecting with the spirits of the landscape through the vibration of fabrics, skins, or other relics.

This installation brings together raw materials from the Jerez landscape, such as albariza soil, vine shoots, and metals. These elements have been processed at high temperatures to glaze ceramics in the style of zambombas.

The Jerez-based artist Belenish Moreno-Gil has manipulated these resonant bodies through percussion, rubbing, immersion, and friction. The sound recordings captured in collaboration with Óscar Escudero were later digitally transformed along with other local recordings to compose the textures, rhythms, and resonances of the work you are now listening to.

BADX (before and after Dry Xérès) is an 18'41" composition that invites us to perceive the vibrant memory of the landscapes of Jerez over time: from the liquid murmur of the Miocene marshes to the emergence of the Holocene, where footsteps burst forth like footprints evoking the first agricultural paths. In the Anthropocene, those footsteps fade beneath the noise of technology, while the sound of liquids becomes dense and viscous, as if matter were beginning to tire. The work ultimately offers two possible futures: one where sound collapses and dies out, and another where footsteps can be heard again as a sign of an emotional continuity with the earth.

2. CYCLES

This installation brings together images, maps, diagrams, sketches and experiments that have nourished the co-creation process of the zambomba object, to which experts in various disciplines have contributed: art (Estelle Jullian), ceramics (Luis Torres, Enrique Carrillo, Antonio Sillero and the students of the Jerez School of Art and Design), glazes (Gresierra), geology and oenology (Willy Pérez), pruning (Vara y Pulgar), urban vegetation (Emparrados), forging (David Olmedo), music (Belenish Moreno-Gil and the Coca family) and history (Valeria Reyes), curated by Nomad Garden.

This is a collection of images that capture experiments and attempts that have linked zambombas with vine arbours in a never-ending cycle that connects albariza soil with vines, vine shoots with candles, ashes with enamelled zambombas, and these with the planting of new vines.

Through these correspondences, the zambomba emerges as a process of circular transformation of materials, practices and meanings around which the community gathers. In view of this, one might wonder whether these everyday gestures of care and celebration could be transformed into new rituals of adaptation to the climate we share.

3. LYRICS

The zambomba is a popular festival, a musical instrument and a repertoire of romances and carols passed down from generation to generation. Claudia GR Moneo, Lucía Franco and Belenish Moreno-Gil explore this living palimpsest from a gender perspective.

As part of SONE, the first two are preparing a repertoire for a future ‘climate zambomba’. This is a selection of traditional lyrics with references to the Jerez landscape, complemented by new compositions of their own. These pieces reuse popular rhythms and melodies, deploying —with the irony and picaresque typical of the genre— a critical view of these current challenges.

During the exhibition, the repertoire will remain open to anyone who wishes to collaborate in writing new carols, exploring the zambomba as a popular conference on climate change. Feel free to compose lyrics on the blackboards with the concepts that resonate most with you from this proposal, or reserve a place in the co-creation workshops by writing to: jerezsone@gmail.com

Note: the instruments in this room have been shaped and enamelled by Gresierra and modified by José Manuel Coca, the last zambomba luthier in Jerez.

4. ALLIANCES

The relationship between zambombas and emparrados can be as paradoxical as it is complementary: the former bring people together around warmth, taming winter. The latter offer shade and coolness, taming summer.

Both, in their season, weave links between matter, community and climate, reminding us that inhabiting a place also means learning to modulate its temperatures collectively.

On the upper floor, we explore these alliances.

4.1. VINE ARBOURS

The use of urban trellises is part of an ancient legacy. Pliny the Elder mentioned that vines had been used since ancient times to shade porticos and courtyards, such as those of Livia in Rome. In Jerez, this practice has remained alive to this day as a bioclimatic and cultural resource.

In 1961, the González-Byass wineries went one step further by covering entire streets such as Ciegos with vines, creating a de facto urban model of climate adaptation that benefited both the wine yeasts and the city's inhabitants. Decades later, in 2022, the Emparrados association —Juan Luis Vega, Miguel Revuelta, Francisco Valenzuela, Esteban García, Jesús Rodríguez and Begoña García, among others— proposed extending this initiative to other streets in the city. In 2024, the project came to fruition in Cadenas, Siete Revueltas, Rincón Malillo and Pozo Dulce, where more than 50 Vitis riparia were planted in 30×40 cm tree pits in collaboration with the City Council. Most of them thrived, although some vines were vandalised, prompting a second planting campaign.

Taking advantage of these incidents, SONE proposes to test the reuse of ceramic zambombas as protective devices for the seedlings. After all, the pots, glazed with the remains of the vines themselves, are part of those everyday objects that refuse to fulfil a single function. Are they not circumstantial friction drums that were previously used as containers for water, oil or wine? Why could they not also serve as vehicles for planting new vines in the city?

4.2. ICONOGRAPHY

Vine arbours have productive and climatic qualities, but they also have symbolic ones. To explore this dimension, art historian Valeria Reyes Soto has begun an iconographic inventory that traces the presence and circulation of their image in the local sphere, consulting archives such as those of the Andalusian Centre for Flamenco Documentation, González-Byass wineries, and Tradición wineries.

Her early work reveals a visual imagery that links the vine with spaces of conviviality, pleasure and tranquillity. These are settings where popular culture and the art of good living intertwine.

Curiously, among the works analysed is a view of the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, which features an ‘Andalusian tavern among the whitewashed pillars of the vine’ called Venta Goyesca and described by the press at the time as ‘the coolest and most delightful place in Barcelona’.

Paradoxically, the German pavilion by Mies van der Rohe, one of the absolute emblems of architectural modernity, stood in the same exhibition. It is ironic that it is in this discreet and humble building camouflaged among vines that we find clues to a better future... or, at least, a ‘cooler and more delightful’ one.

4.3. APPs