Columns - Cartografies
by Lorenza Pigatti




The story of Antonino Fernández Rodríguez—born in 1917 in Cerezales del Condado, a village of barely thirty inhabitants in northwestern Spain—speaks to us of origins, migrations, and potential.
Fernández emigrated to Mexico after the civil war, where he became the CEO of Grupo Modelo, the largest brewery in the Latin American country, from 1971 to 1997. Despite the distance, Fernández always returned to his place of birth, supporting over the years the improvement of the water supply system, the restoration of the church, the hermitage, the cemetery, and the redevelopment of the main square. Not only that: in 2008 he inaugurated the Fundación Cerezales Antonino y Cinia, which he had endowed, an institution whose aim is to promote national and international knowledge and culture for the citizens of the small village.

“Every place deserves a map,” writes Rebecca Solnit in Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. In the book, the American writer examines different areas of the Bay Area and takes us on a tour where she recounts places where murders were committed, abandoned shipyards from the Second World War, Zen Buddhist centers, and queer sites—just to name a few—visualized through maps drawn by artists, writers, and cartographers.

The Foundation is creating a new cartography within the cultural scene of Cerezales del Condado. It builds a bridge between past and future. It records the history of the village, marked by conflicts and by the massive emigration that lasted throughout the 20th century, and the commitment of a citizen-migrant who seeks, through culture, to halt the depopulation of an area severely affected by rural abandonment. The Foundation is a kind of territorial development agency, and to ensure the direct participation of local residents, the president of the Junta Vecinal (a territorial body below the level of the municipality) also serves on the Foundation’s board of directors.

But let us proceed in order. The first mission of Antonino Fernández, who died in 2016 in Mexico City, was to restore the village schools, starting with the last classroom he attended before leaving Cerezales at age 14, after the civil war. The schools, designed by the architect Luis Aparicio Guisasola, date back to the republican era and feature a central division: one part for boys and one for girls, each with its own courtyard. In the 1950s, rural exodus led to the closing of the school and the abandonment of the building.

Today, the schools are only one of the venues of the Fundación Cerezales. In 2017 the new building was inaugurated, designed by the studio AZPML: a 2,800-square-meter larch-wood structure inspired by the huts found in rural areas. The building, surrounded by a large green area, allows the various uses of the center to be distributed across five different spaces, including the exhibition hall, the library, the studios for resident artists, and the auditorium. The Foundation’s activities are many and concern primarily three expressive fields: music, contemporary art, and ethno-education. Exhibitions by emerging or established artists such as Richard Serra or Eduardo Chillida, workshops ranging from electronic music to local animal husbandry, alternate with gatherings that promote the recovery of traditional knowledge and community dialogue through an understanding of the natural environment.

The Foundation’s team is composed of human beings and animals. In the large stable built in the Foundation’s park live the cow Bonita, along with the oxen Rogante, Lindo, Pardo, and Lucero, and the donkey Quintín. They—together with the beauty of the place and the quality of the curatorial programme—make a visit to the Foundation even more special.