Commonspolis has joined forces with several local associations of Castielfabib (Albar, Cultural Association of Castielfabib) – a village located in the Valencian Community in Spain – and with the City Council of Castielfabib to organise a meeting on 10, 11 and 12 October entitled “REBATO : PRIMER TOQUE POR LOS TERRITORIOS RURALES”.
In Spain, the word ‘Rebato’ refers to the tocsin or drum sound used in villages to summon the inhabitants, announce news or warn them of danger. “Tocar a Rebato” means to give the alarm. In this case, it refers to the need to attract everyone’s attention in order to revive the importance of rural territories, which are depopulated and forgotten by public policies in Spain.
Rebato consists of a series of activities that will take place in open and closed spaces in the municipality of Castielfabib, according to current health and safety standards and with limited capacity.
WHY REBATO ?
In a context of environmental and climatic urgency, galloping urbanisation and overcoming the limits of the planet, local communities and rural villages form a network of territories of refuge, spaces of resilience, in which culture, understood as the totality of social relations and relations with nature, is based on values of solidarity, respect and sustainability.
This intangible and popular cultural asset, often forgotten by cultural policies focused on the protection of tangible and folk heritage, is today acquiring a strategic character in the current context of systemic crisis.
All local, popular and ancestral knowledge must not only be preserved, but must also be linked to each other, in order to dialogue, be shared and lived in the habits and customs of our societies. Rebato aims to be this plural meeting point, an agora of dialogues of knowledge that connects diverse visions, proposes complementary points of view, from outside and inside the region, to present a territorial reality rich in artistic representations that range from music to tomatoes, from images to dance, from “gachas” (traditional local dish) to theatre or from the forest to rupestrian paintings …
With Rebato, we want to reinforce the conviction that there will be no solution to the current crises without the voice and the resilience of rural territories and their inhabitants. In this sense, Rebato is a call to the citizens of towns and villages, to joint action in times of emergency, it is a warning signal against the danger of demoralization and inaction, but also a call for creative and festive cooperation.
Finally, Rebato is fundamentally an invitation to dialogue about what fascinates us, the performing arts, agriculture, food, health, ecology, maintenance and agro-ecology for, with and from rural territories.
Castielfabib, October 2, 2020.
This text was co-written by the Rebato organisation group.
You can discover below the programme of activities of Rebato or download the complete programme.
For more information, find Rebato and watch the online conferences on the social networks Facebook , Twitter et Instagram.
Rebato was carried out with the support of the Foundation Open Society Initiative for Europe – OSIFE and the Diputación of Valencia.