The forest is one of the most interesting elements of the landscape due to its history, characterized from its origins by a profound duality. Its material and spiritual, tangible and intangible, real and symbolic dimensions blend and interrelate repeatedly over the centuries.

Maxi Fuentes will talk about how those who took to the woods, exiles, and refugees were, and continue to be, a fundamental expression of civil wars and traumatic social and political processes. These figures allow us to think of the forest as a space of political struggle and a setting for death, life, and refuge. The two world wars, the Spanish Civil War, and all conflicts after 1945 demonstrate this. Joan Nogué will outline a historical synthesis of the forest and show how, paradoxically, today, progressively confined by the expansion of agricultural lands into the most marginal areas of the territory, the forest has once again become the refuge landscape it once was.

Activity linked to the exhibition “Holes for a requiem.” In collaboration with the Walter Benjamin Chair and the Forest Chair of the University of Girona.