The Agrocuir da Ulloa Festival returns to claim respect for diversity in rural areas
The days August 26 and 27 the municipality of Monterroso, one of the three that make up the region of A Ulloa, will host the VII Agrocuir da Ulloa Festival. An intergenerational festival, organized by the Agrocuir da Ulloa Collective, which claims values such as environmentalism, feminism and respect for diversity in rural areas. This year's artists include Pandeireteiros Cántigas e Frores, Meiga-i, Celeste González, Fado Bicha, Xosé Lois Romero & Aliboria, Catuxa Salom and O Rabelo.
What started out as a party with friends at the Granxa Maruxa de monterroso has been growing over the years to become an intergenerational and diverse festival that covers several areas and has moved its headquarters to up to nine stages in the regional capital. «We claim a queer nature as a source of monstrous fantasies that encourage and move us to claim lively and diverse ruralities. We appeal to imaginaries rooted in Galician culture, mythological and magical entities that inhabit its fragas. That ascendancy, always in constant recreation, is expressed in numerous rites and celebrations such as Carnival, a moment of freedom to dress up and alter the order of things; experiment with the borders between genders, but also transmute with nature from the bark of the trees, the moss or the antlers«, describe the organizers.
«Also talk about how difficult it is to live in the city«, He claims Adrian Gallego, one of the members of the organization. Gallego puts the focus on the fact that the rural usually bears the stigma of worse living conditions when the urban also carries cases of precariousness, difficulties in finding housing or violence.
The rural exists
The festival, which was conceived as a small party among friends, has turned A Ulloa in the showcase of rural diversity. “There was an absence, also from the academy itself, of this memory. And there was a demand to meet those needs”, assures the researcher Frank Quiroga, assistant and collaborator of the Agrocuir Festival since its first edition in 2015. Write your own story so that others do not write it. Identify referents. Trace genealogies.
The mirror explains Frank Quiroga, It is not "only [the philosopher] Judith Butler, she can also be a grandmother. Or a neighbor who didn't have boobs and didn't get her period, because she was intersex, but she was 100 years ago”. Or the transformism shows that, since at least 1899, occupied cafes and theaters in the city of Lugo. This archeology of the movement in defense of sexual-affective diversity, for now materialized in 'Facemonos escoitar?', is the product of “a lever”. which activated the Agrocuir Festival by connecting people, ideas and actions. And all in a rural context.
