Front and back

The archives of León Cathedral hold an outstanding collection of documents written on parchment made from calfskins. On the back of one of them, known as “Nodicia de kesos” and dated between 974 and 980, Semeno, a monk in charge of the food administration of this monastery, writes down a list of cheeses given to members of the religious community as payment for their work. This list of cheeses is one of the first texts in the Proto-Romance language, the predecessor of Asturleonese and prior to Castilian. Its historical and linguistic importance is incalculable. However, its obverse side documents the donation of land made in 959 by Hermenegildo and Cita to the monastery of Rozuela, between Chozas de Abajo and Ardón, corresponding to a village called Auctarios.

Writing land on animal skins was one of the first gestures of ownership, an inscription that marked the beginning of the fragmentation of the land. The cow mutated into toponymy and typologies of plots were written on leather: gleba, era, serna, losa, valley, barrial, cerrillo, pedriza, páramo, huerta, solar, pomar, prado, majada, dehesa...

In some parts of the world, human dominion over the planet still contains biblical echoes and a recurring hierarchical image: men - and animals at their service - on the face of the earth. Subjected to questioning, transferred to the thin layers of animal skin written in human handwriting, the weight transforms the perception of what surrounds us. The edge of the parchment now opens up the human being and acquires the conception of a lens through which to observe the world. Through this lens Kimia Kamvari (Cologne, 1986) focuses on some of the deformities - and sorrows - of our own species. With her, this crude balance seems to be inverted in some cultures to give rise to different ways of relating to each other. What or who is over or under what is the starting premise of generalised civilisational narratives. The image of the Earth resting on the cow, or the cow supporting the weight of the Earth is found in Persian cosmology and, now, as we turn the digitised pages of the documentary catalogue on the computer, among the metal preservation filing cabinets, scanners and databases, it connects with the land deeds preserved in the archive, written on parchment in the early Middle Ages.

The surface of the cow acquires the quality of a surface of the world. Its skin, transformed into parchment, takes on the quality of a screen: a place of representation. On this screen, processes of production of the world are isolated and visualised: partitions, sales, donations, and endowing images of the power that sustains them in terms of technology. Inscribing land on animal skin has been an invention aimed at changing the rules of ownership of the world around us. 

Writing the earth implies operating in its geography, where the word geo, earth in Greek, shares a sonorous and symbolic root with gāv, cow in Persian. The same sound - the letter g-e or g-a - designates that whose fertility sustains, nourishes and gives body to the world.