If the wind blew away his Indiana Jones-style hat, if he took off his explorer’s vest with dozens of magical pockets, or if a thief from three to a quarter stole the camera that hangs around his neck like a third arm, Eugenio Monesma Moliner would give the strange (and unfair) feeling of losing all your vital, expansive and contagious energy. Just as George Lucas catapulted an archeology professor capable of locating objects of historical relevance to world fame, our adventurer prefers the cheeses of lost shepherds or the sweets of cloistered monks over the grail or the ark of the alliance.
On November 21, 1952, the exact date of birth of this ethnographic director and producer from Huesca, the more than 3,200 documentaries on customs, trades, crafts and gastronomic traditions from different parts of Spain that he lists without problems in the open drawers of his memory, They still did not symbolize everything they represent today: the last stop towards an announced death. At the speed of light, the mechanization of the countryside, intensive production, massive migration to large cities, and transversal digitization hit the ground like the perfect storm, joining forces to annihilate a very particular lifestyle in slow motion. a lifestyle neither good nor bad that should not be romanticized more than necessary, and that was simply what it was with the wounds from the Civil War on the tips of the fingers and the wrinkles on the forehead.
With 70 years between his chest and back, Eugenio Monesma carries without blinking an eye the slab of traditional culture in danger of extinction. A self-inflicted responsibility that not only does not bother him, but has given him wings, a reason to live and a mission that, little by little, reaches its final destination for almost biological reasons. He only frowns when they tell him about new technologies and Internet hackers who have stolen his Facebook account for several weeks, deleting all the historical documentaries he had published for free. Hackers erasing tradition, what nonsense. “Although I won’t be able to get them back, I’ve decided that I’m going to continue publishing old and new documentaries to get out of this unpleasant rut,” he says like an inveterate notary.
In its audiovisual and photographic archive of traditional culture, the largest and most complete in Spain, Monesma preserves audiovisual treasures, such as that of the pine cones and their pine nuts. “When young people see my documentary about pine nuts, popularly called human squirrels, they understand a little better why pine nuts are so expensive today,” he says before an audience full of outstanding chefs and cooks during the celebration of Diálogos de Cocina . And it shows intoxicating images of gangs of men with hooks attached to their boots to shake the pine forests with rods as long as the branches of the most unreachable trees. “As they say, the height of the pines is five meters of stairs, six of a pole, two of a man, and three meters of climbing through the trunk.” And in the background, the whisper of approval from the audience of the Basque Culinary Center, surely thinking of the half-kilo bag of pine nuts from the country, at 61 euros on the market. A price that doubles that of the Chinese pine nut, almost half, and that is justified by the small number of pine trees that produce the edible fruit. “Nobody climbs trees with ladders anymore. Now the pine cones use machines that throw all the cones to the ground at night and the problem has become triple: risk of decomposition, the existing fauna and human theft. There are many lawsuits underway for theft of pine nuts due to their market price”.
And so, image by image and word by word, Eugenio Monesma manages to multiply collective awareness with hundreds of other trades related to the food system that sustain the economy of many rural families: crops, drinks, hunting, fishing, transformation, pastoral gastronomy, accessories and popular festivals of good food. That is, to dignify capers, dried figs, noodles, honey, conger eel, barnacles, oil, natural dyes, saffron, ice, sweets from cloistered nuns and a long etcetera. Even something as unlikely as tallow balls together with the women who make them possible. “It’s like a rural Starlux broth,” he blurts out to the surprise and laughter of his own and strangers. “The old women from the town of San Juan de Plan in the Aragonese valley of Chistau told me about it. From that small municipality I took thirty-three documentaries: from the cultivation of hemp to the plaster ovens or the thatched roofs and the rye crops. But when They invited me to try the bait ball soup, I was left in the picture. It’s delicious and it gets you out of trouble in the middle of the field,” he says.
A few years ago, Eugenio Monesma realized that he had a certain social responsibility. “Some of the audiovisual pieces that I have been producing are serving many groups to recover lost knowledge”. And curiously, the ones who let him know were the youngest through his YouTube channel, a channel with more than 900,000 subscribers who have no idea that the cameraman, the sound technician, the script and the production of all the pieces they are the work and grace of a single person who, for a generation, could be your grandfather. With this minimal infrastructure, it is even more remarkable that only with the support of their children, Eloy and Dario, in communication through social networks, the longest-running program on Canal Cocina with more than 1,400 recipes and 23 consecutive seasons on the air, be it yours. “A little over three years ago, I didn’t know what to do with all this accumulated audiovisual material. He was thinking of giving the entire file to some institution until an unprecedented interest in Youtube exploded ”.
Monsema assures that there are three types of traditional trade: the few that are still active, others that have been lost but still stored the machines to recreate the traditional system without losing credibility, and those that there is no way to emulate. “When I started collecting trades there were many problems. I am talking about the eighties, when the very protagonists of the trades felt ashamed of their jobs: charcoal makers or espadrille makers were considered humiliating trades, jobs for poor people and they themselves did not understand why someone wanted to record their work with a camera when society it separated or pushed them into anonymity. Now it is the other way around, they contact me daily so that I can go see them and that their legacy is not lost”.
Hence, Monesma sees the documentary format as the best shell to achieve the most truthful direct testimony. “If you look at how the televisions approach rural activities, the problem is that the protagonist is always the journalist. Even with the formulation of the works they only leave the right to approval as a response. It pisses me off a lot. Supposedly they want to dignify their work and what they do is appropriate the tradition to leave them only yes or no for an answer. In none of my documentaries do I appear to become the center of the news. We communicators give ourselves too much importance, let them tell their own story”.
A very good example of what counts on wisdom is the transhumance with the shepherds for eight days. “In the dead moments is where you can collect very valuable information told by themselves. You have to live with them, go with an open mind and never feel smarter than anyone else. These are the three sins into which many communicators fall. If you don’t talk about yourself sharing a language, there will never be a shared universe and everything will be wasted time. When you manage to cross that border, the grandmothers even give me some compliments ”, she assures with a clean laugh. Hence, he seeks that the men and women of the field that he carefully records always look at the camera when they speak. “This is how they speak to the viewer. It bothers me when they look at the journalist and forget who is on the other side”.
The years go by for everyone and Eugenio Monesma faces the passage of time almost like the lost trades he adores. “I make fewer trips, but in one day I can record nine recipes. I have all year organizing a good raid throughout the territory because I don’t know how long it will last. I really don’t know. The fatigue is noticeable and I arrive at the hotel with a broken back, ”he says without pity in his eyes. The generational change is not in his children, rather in a trusted apprentice who has already worked alongside him with a good hand. “I trust that with him this will not stop. You can’t stop because not everyone can eat in big restaurants and, on the other hand, if they go to Cuenca everyone can eat a good morteruelo or an Iberian black Avilanian cow steak in Ávila”, and closes the talk singing regional songs and Showing phones of new contacts and old trades.
