On 20 October 2025, INLAND hosted its Creative Assembly in Madrid’s Casa de Campo, a field-based gathering designed to foster a critical, cross-disciplinary perspective on natural-cultural heritage practices in metropolitan public spaces and on the coexistence of communities and landscapes.
Around ninety participants, including guest speakers, architecture students from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Goethe University Frankfurt, Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, and Politecnico di Milano, along with local residents and members of INLAND’s practising community, gathered in the heart of the Mediterranean forest to reflect and exchange.
INLAND’s founder and president Fernando García-Dory opened the event by introducing Casa de Campo, Spain’s largest urban park, and outlining INLAND’s work at the intersection of agricultural, social and cultural production. This vast forest, a contested space shaped by diverse users and environmental dynamics, forms part of INLAND’s ongoing exploration of Transformative Territories, a practice that includes shepherding a flock of sheep through the park and carrying out artistic interventions to question our relationship with land and commons.
The Assembly continued with a presentation by architect and artist Sergio Bravo, who collaborated with INLAND in 2025 to rethink forest uses and dynamics. His work led to the creation of a Forest–Flock Classroom, a Forest Pavilion, and a series of participatory exercises developed with collaborators such as Lily McCraith, aiming to reimagine the forest as both a learning and a living space. Participants later embarked on a collective walk to the El Cristo de las Bombas monument, guided by a member of the Asociación de Amigos de la Casa de Campo, who shared insights into the park’s layered history.
In the afternoon, philosopher Patrick Degeorges (Institute for Advanced Studies in Practices and Arts of Transformation) led a participatory exercise entitled Learning As Inhabiting – Inhabiting as Learning to Be Inhabited, introduced through a reading of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”. Participants dispersed across the landscape to listen attentively – not to analyse, but to let the forest speak through them. The questions that arose from this deep listening were gathered and refined in small groups, then placed into four symbolic baskets, one for each direction, before being read aloud in a collective ritual of shared reflection.
The day concluded with a talk by geoscientist Hugo Gomes (Instituto Terra Memoria), whose research in geoarchaeology, geoconservation, geomorphology and landscape offered further grounding for the discussion. Together with Patrick Degeorges, whose work focuses on ecological transition and organisational transformation, they provided complementary perspectives on how to think, sense and act in territories undergoing ecological and social change.
Throughout the day, the Creative Assembly reaffirmed INLAND’s commitment to rooting knowledge production in lived places, weaving together artistic research, rural revitalisation, food production, and advocacy for pastoral and nomadic ways of life. In Casa de Campo, learning unfolded as an act of inhabiting, listening, and caring, an invitation to imagine the forest not only as a resource, but as a shared and sentient territory.
Read more at the Inland´s website
