Tranhuman Cookings: Acous-coustic Sessions
Blanca, Valle del Ricote, Murcia
Acous-coustic Sessions is part of Transhumant Cookery (Cocinas Transhumantes).
It takes the form of a series of gatherings where tablecloths are adorned with elements related to the vegetable garden, ingredients, food preparation, and etymology. These tablecloths will serve as a means of bringing people together and documenting a collective recipe book and an oral glossary linked to foods, place names, and knowledge of the vegetable garden.
Murcian and Moroccan cuisine share much more than meets the eye: ingredients, cooking methods, place names, and irrigation systems that are deeply rooted in their shared Al-Andalus past. Bajocas, fava beans, michirones, and apricots share not only an Arabic etymology but also the ways in which they are prepared.
Building on this shared heritage, Acous-coustic Sessions proposes a series of gatherings where food, oral tradition, and music intertwine to foster a sense of community among the different villages of Blanca, a municipality located in the Region of Murcia. The project compiles a shared recipe book from the communities of Blanca, featuring locally produced ingredients, and an oral glossary of terms related to recipes, place names, and knowledge of the vegetable garden. It also explores techniques associated with farming: natural dyes made from pomegranate, onion, or lemon, and the use of henna as a drawing medium.
Event Schedule:
Era de Oxox | La Casa de los Engarces | MUCAB Building
Session 1 · April 18 and 25 and May 2, 2026, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Location: Era de Oxox (Murcia)
Substrates: Agrodiversity and Ancestral Wisdom of the Ricote Valley | Workshop on agroecology and food with Nat Llorente (Ecologistas en Acción) at Era de Oxox, a vegetable garden located between Blanca and Ojos.
Workshop on agroecology and food at Era de Oxox, a vegetable garden located between Blanca and Ojos. This workshop explores traditional food production and its historical legacy linked to the Al-Andalus period. The site where the vegetable garden is located is designated as a BIC (Site of Cultural Interest), as it has preserved its original irrigation and food production structure for a millennium, inheriting the system from Amazigh society.
Session 2 · June 30 · July 1 and 2, 2026, from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. · Acous-coustic Performance: July 3 at 7:30 p.m.
Location: La Casa de los Engarces. Carretera de Ojos, 26 (Blanca)
At ground level. Traces of Memory | Acous-coustic sessions with the Al’ Akhawat collective. The event revolves around Andalusian memory, the cultures of the vegetable garden, and collective practices linked to cooking and textiles. Using the tablecloth as an everyday archive and a space for gathering, they draw on various artistic disciplines for their interventions (plants, henna, calligraphy, transfers, and other processes linked to artisanal knowledge and forms of transmission found in Islamic and Amazigh cultures…). The process invites us to reflect on how certain memories survive in domestic gestures, in ways of cooking, gathering, and sharing a meal, using the act of dining together and its power as a methodology.
Session 3 · July 9 and 16, 5:30–8:30 p.m. · Acous-coustic Presentation: July 24, 2026, at 7:30 p.m.
Location: MUCAB Building. Calle Cervantes s/n, 30540 (Blanca)
The Tablecloth of the Two Lands | Acous-coustic sessions in collaboration with the AsoKultura association, a visual exploration of the Hispano-Arabic culinary heritage and rural life. The tablecloth is not limited to its physical form; it is also a symbol of a set table where history (the Arab), the land (the rural), and the community (collective work) come together.
During the workshops, we explore elements that represent this shared heritage, such as artichokes, eggplants, citrus fruits (lemons, bitter oranges), pomegranates, saffron, rice, and sugarcane. Geometric lacework motifs and garden tools are also explored. For the prints, cyanotypes and antotypes are used, along with techniques such as patchwork. The assemblages serve as a reflection of this shared legacy, presented alongside couscous.
Session 4 · Kiln Construction: August 3–7, 2026 · Firing Workshop and Presentation at La Casa de los Engarces: August 30, 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m.
Location: La Casa de los Engarces. Carretera de Ojos, 26 (Blanca)
From One Soil to Another | In collaboration with the artistic collective La Cuarta Piel, this project involves an exercise in material experimentation based on the collection and study of clays from the Segura River. The sediments, compacted and dried until they fragment, form a stratigraphy that connects territories linked by runoff. The project culminates in the construction of a wood-fired oven inside La Casa de los Engarces—a type of oven closely tied to the history of the southern Iberian Peninsula’s agricultural landscape since the Al-Andalus period.
The Acous-coustic sessions are part of a research project by Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval on the relationship between acoustics, the domestic sphere, and the circular economy. Each session consists of three days of work—preparing tablecloths with drawings and interventions, communal cooking, and sound art and oral history—and a public presentation at the end of the program.
The lab is comprised of:
Local partner: La Casa de los Engarces
La Casa de los Engarces is an initiative by Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval that combines textile practice, audiovisual production, and agroecology in Blanca. Its name pays homage to Ibn Arabi and his work The Links of Wisdom, using the idea of the “link” as a metaphor for the interconnection between bodies of knowledge and communities. They work with the vegetable garden as both a metaphor and a medium, documenting agricultural practices, connecting with the esparto textile tradition, and using audiovisual media to produce shared narratives about the local landscape.
Zineb Achoubie (Casablanca) is a visual artist and weaver trained in Fine Arts and at the Royal Academy of Traditional Arts of Morocco. Since 2018, she has been researching Amazigh culture in collaboration with cooperatives and weavers from the Atlas Mountains, reflecting on textiles as a system of writing and a space for social interweaving. She has exhibited at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), IVAM (Valencia), the Bamako Biennale, the Dakar Biennale, and Villa Romana (Florence).
Lorenzo Sandoval (Madrid, 1980) works as an artist, filmmaker, and curator. He is a recipient of the Generación Prize and the 5th DKV-Álvarez Margaride Fellowship. He was nominated for the 2018 Berlin Art Prize. He represented Finland at the 2019 Venice Biennale with the Miracle Workers Collective. He has exhibited at IVAM, Centro Párraga, SAVVY, and the 2018 Dak’art Biennale. Together, they explore the relationships between acoustics, the domestic sphere, and the circular economy.
Artists: La Cuarta Piel, Al’ Akhawat, and Asokultura
La Cuarta Piel is a platform and community of practice based in Alicante that explores the intersection of art, architecture, and ecology. Founded by artists and architects, its work seeks to link environmental stewardship and territorial transformation with sensitive and hedonistic human experiences.
Al’ Akhawat is a multidisciplinary art collective made up of six creators from the Moroccan diaspora in Spain. Their work explores the reality of migration, the sense of dual belonging, and memory through various forms of expression such as poetry, the visual arts, and cultural resistance.
Asokultura is a cultural association in Blanca, Murcia, founded in 2017 that organizes workshops, courses, exhibitions, literary readings, and much more, rooted in the town’s identity and history.
Nat Llorente Nosti is a mother, biologist, teacher, translator, and eco-farmer. Since 2003, she has managed the La Era de Oxox farm in the heart of the Ricote Valley. An expert in socio-environmental strategies and public participation, she has been advocating for the valley for decades and participates in all kinds of events to raise awareness of its values and suggest steps to preserve and conserve it. Nat has extensive experience as an educator and facilitator.
Ecologistas en Acción Región Murciana is a member of Spain’s largest confederation of environmental groups, founded in 1998. With an assembly-based structure, it is part of the social environmentalism movement, which views environmental problems as stemming from an increasingly globalized and unsustainable model of production and consumption—a model from which other social problems also arise—and which it considers necessary to transform if we are to avoid an ecological crisis.
Acous-coustic Blanca Sessions is part of Cocinas Transhumantes, a project curated by hablarenarte · 2026, which is supported by the Ministry of Culture (Grants for Cultural Projects with Special Social Impact).
