cefvigo gallery

             SPITTING WINDWARD

MANUEL SENDÓN

It is known that man cannot compete with Nature in beauty. In this Land´s End, unfortunately, we do know that man can surpass Nature in destruction.
Here it is the prophecy of the fuel, announced by every shipwreck:
Polycommander, Urquiola, Casón, Mar Exeo… Galiza, the only place on Earth where the oil tankers stumble- not twice- but three, four times, on the same stone: the Government’s incompetence.
And then the Prestige. What could have been a minor accident became the real staging of the Ocean’s death. The belch of just one ship hurt the sea from Portugal to France and concentrated all its force against the dream of the last virgin beaches in the West: A Costa da Morte.
On the sand we learned that there is only an antidote to the grief-stricken sea : the people.
The ”fast relief” of the latest technologies just brings more pain to the rocks. But the small tools in the volunteers’ hands become precious objects capable of giving the ocean its infinite solace back.
This is the sea’s alliance. The spirit of life of the people who shouted ¡Never Again! in front of all those who insist on spitting windward.
The Prestige disaster shows the definitive failure of a system in which oil has more power than the states, than people, than Nature.
From the periphery of Europe, it was our turn, Galician people’s turn, to raise questions about this obsolete order and become the real ambassadors of the Ocean.
Come to this Land’s End. We are still waiting for you. Behind this anti-sea there is a wonderful country. And we, people from the seashore, are here to invent the future.
¡Never Again!

XURXO SOUTO
Member of Plataforma Nunca Máis

Since I was a child, I have heard, or sometimes seen, fantastic stories that had to do with the sea.
The sea so full of oranges that made its colour change. Fishermen who fished French brandy with their nets. A village painted with condensed milk. Children with whistle-like candies that the sea had washed up. Enormous iron ships smashed on the rocks or just lying in the middle of the sand…. The sea washed up in many different ways all the objects it had previously taken.
The case of the Prestige is a totally different matter. The sea washed up something that it did not like, something that it had received against nature. The result was foreseeable. The scientists had studied the Christmas jet, a jet that would make the oil return to the coast. But because of the disdain that our authorities showed for this country, they did not even ask for the scientists’ opinion, they just spat windward.
The rocks of the beach where I usually swim are black. Nemiña looked like the negative of one of Christo’s works. The sight of O CCoido in Muxía was devastating. Broken street lamps, black trees, dying birds and crabs , covered in oil, the rocks, the sand, the promenade, the gardens, the playground, black. Everything black. An apocalyptic landscape. It reminded us of the images broadcast when the Gulf War in 1991, like the one of the bird covered in oil, which turned out to be a bird affected by the Exxon Valdez oil slick. In the meantime, they kept on denying the existence of an oil slick over and over.
At once, volunteers came from everywhere and, with their hands and tools, which were supposed to be used for other matters, enthusiastically began a task, a task for which there were no written instructions. This is how the objects covered in oil acquired a new life and at the same time became the symbol of the situation of that moment. It was an exasperating task because, like Sisyphus, they had to clean the beaches and rocks that had been cleaned the day before.
The barnacle fishers of the Costa da Morte saw their livelihood ruined, and they responded with energy. I remember Christmas Eve in Touriñán. A couple of dozen barnacle fishers were removing the oil patches with hoes, just as if they were hoeing, while in a second line hundreds of soldiers did not have enough hands to carry all the oil that the barnacle fishers had removed.
In the Rías Baixas the fishermen went out to sea to face the oil, challenging the sea and the bans. Frying pans, forks, rakes and other everyday tools were transformed, while the blacksmiths designed odd devices suitable to fish the oil. This way they wrote one of the most epic pages of the history of the sea in Galiza.
As the ship was spilling just thin threads of plasticine, the Portuguese Hydrographic Institute informed us that the ship was leaking more than one hundred tonnes every day. This information was substituted by political propaganda, provoking a collective sense of outrage. As a consequence of all this, a movement called Nunca Máis (Never Again) was born. Hundreds of thousands of Galician people who demand responsibilities, dignity and future for a country that has been mistreated, responded to the call. In our country, whose people are supposed to be submissive and conservative, nothing similar had been seen before. Although the expression Nunca Máis continues to be a proper noun, it has also become, even out of Galiza, a synonym for civic uprising against injustice.
At present, the pressure water guns go on spitting windward in the Costa da Morte.

Long life for the spirit of Nunca Máis

Manuel Sendón
Sardiñeiro, april 2003