Where are we?

In Spain, 184 municipalities are currently engaged in decarbonization processes as part of the national 'Just Transition' strategy. This public policy seeks to promote new opportunities for sustainable economic activity and employment while mitigating the social and economic impacts of phasing out polluting industries. One emblematic case is Barruelo de Santullán (Palencia, Castilla y León), a town that had 7,372 inhabitants in 1960 and now counts just 1,182. The closure of coal mines and thermal power plants left a deep socio-environmental wound. Today, the local council is turning to culture to imagine new futures. A participatory artistic intervention could help address this “energy aftermath,” rebuild fragile social ties, and attract younger generations to reinhabit the territory.

In Germany, the 780-year-old village of Wietstock reflects the tensions of contemporary industrial agriculture. While large European agri-corporations now manage most of the surrounding land with intensive monoculture and pig farming, local residents maintain small private gardens with animals and vegetables, ensuring food security for vulnerable households. These gardens represent one of the last spaces for a self-determined relationship with land and nutrition. Yet they are also threatened by climate change, pollution from industrial farming, and the draining of nearby marshlands. This “agriculture aftermath” opens up a space to rethink the village’s ecological future through local knowledge and artistic exploration.

Contrasting with Spain’s Mediterranean context and Germany’s industrial agriculture, the case of Šibenik in Croatia highlights the legacy of early electrification. Powered by the Krka River and its waterfalls, Šibenik was one of the first cities in the world to adopt alternating current, spurring rapid industrial growth throughout the 20th century, especially in carbide production. But with the industry's collapse in the early 2000s, the city shifted abruptly to a tourism-based economy. Today, the challenge of this “electricity aftermath” is to reflect on the industrial past, its environmental cost, and to question whether tourism alone can sustain the city’s future.

In Couso (Galicia, Spain) has been moving from the exploitation of species that deteriorated and impoverished the soil (such as acacias, eucalyptus and pines) to the use of traditional native species. This territory was recognized as ICCA Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas by United Nations but the still have problems with acacias and also improvement of local self-esteem of objectives achieved. The creation of a living lab and its subsequent artistic materialization can be a milestone in the community and also for the rest of the 3000 common mountains in Galicia.

The problems Boom, a small village in Flanders (Belgium), faces are illustrative of the dangers of unbridled economic growth on the expenses of the use of natural resources in today's society. As for the clay mines, in many European territories they have been abandoned in the first half of the 20th century, this has caused the abandonment of many villages, but even so, in these territories local knowledge related to the management of clay continues to survive and your chances. They want art to play a role in the increasing awareness of the new ecology emerging on their excavated land and a growing historical insight of the role their industrial past has played.

In the Jura (France), a mid-mountain territory marked by heavy forestation and a topography of ridges, coombes and valleys but also irrigated by a large network of rivers, natural lakes and wetlands, water represents a major environmental challenge for this region in view of the climate changes underway. The Haut-Jura Regional Nature Park is an important player as regards the future of water resources. In parallel with the problem of the quality of the resource and the restoration of the environment, the question of the quantity of water will be a crucial issue for the rural mid-range mountains territories in the years to come.