Some sixty years and 50 kilometers separate the two women who, in giant photographs, welcome those who enter the Museu del Blat de Cervera. It is inaugurated this Wednesday, March 29, in the old flour mill of the city, known as the Farinera del Sindicat with the aim of being, more than a container for parts, a transformation center.
Marc Verdés, the curator of the exhibition ‘Farmer Societies and Agrarian Alternatives’ poses a look between Cinta de Ca la Maria Toia, a 20th-century farmer from Maldà (photograph by Josep Maria Miró) and Nuria de Cal Bord (photograph by Attila Ibos ), which develops an agroecological project, La Garbiana, in Tarroja de Segarra. His intention is to value the role of women in peasant culture and female leadership in proposing alternatives.
It is the ‘Faces and Landscapes’ area, one of the six exhibition areas in the city’s old flour mill, which was part of the old Cervera Agricultural Union. This building declared a Cultural Property of National Interest is the work of the architect Cèsar Martinell, the modernist architect, disciple of Antoni Gaudí and is behind a large number of wineries and silos in Catalonia.
The great Segarra, which analyzes the debate on the limits of the Segarra, current these days due to the interest of Biosca and Torá in leaving the region to belong to Solsonès, the dichotomy between agribusiness and food sovereignty, the revitalization of the museum, the singularities of the building and material culture, are the areas in which the museum wants to work.
The area of ??material culture will house elements of the old Museu del Blat, closed 10 years ago and inaugurated in the 1960s by the historian Agusti Duran i Sanpere and Ramon Vidal, a landowner from Montpalau, who seeing that the mechanization of the countryside would leave habitual tools in disuse , they made an appeal and in just two days they got the donation of a thousand pieces.
“We like to play with the idea of ??what began in the 60s with a collective collection and continues now with a spirit of citizen participation, because what is intended is to set up a museum that is far removed from that idea of ??a museum containing objects. to become another space for reflection”, affirms the director of the Museu del Blat, Carme Bergés.
The exhibition interpellates with questions such as ‘What (with) do we use that farming?’ ‘La Segarra, the granary of Catalonia?’ ‘Why museumize the flour mill?
“I like to talk more about an interrogative museum. We don’t give too many answers, but we ask a lot of questions so that people can think about alternative systems on food sovereignty or sustainability”, adds Bergés, also director of the Museu Comarcal de Cervera.
“Our main concern is to be able to work in a coordinated way with the producers and ask ourselves where the rural world or the Catalan countryside is headed, and especially La Segarra, which is still eminently agrarian,” insists Bergés.
Of the museography, the combination of the warehouse itself with exhibited objects stands out. The exhibition modules are shelves where the entire museum collection is stored and a nod to the rural world as seen by artists, with a work by the precursor of object collage and visual poetry, and also a pharmacist from Agramunt, Guillem Viladot that he transformed into art objects of the rural world.
For her part, the Councilor for Culture of Cervera, Mercè Carulla, assures that the City Council was interested in recovering the historic building linked to Catalan trade unionism, agricultural production and the country’s economy: “Through the European LEADER rural development program we saw the opportunity to recover the equipment taking into account that the old Museu del Blat on Calle Major had closed and all the objects were in storage. According to their data, the City Council has received 69,995 from the LEADER program and has contributed 178,239 from its own funds.
