Hazelnut Diplomacy for Sijena
A hominid takes a bone from the ground and throws it into space. A leap of 4 million years. The future is this bone made into a spaceship up there. The beginning of 2001: A Space Odyssey It really happened to the Les Avellanes monastery. Today, the space-time capitombes never stop spinning. Stanley Kubrick already wants to get out of the coffin.
A man haunted by yesterday and tomorrow knocks on the door of the church of Vilanova de la Sal on October 2, 1906. Josep Utgé has been running for kilometers. He is the steward of Avellanas. To serve them. Yes, that's it: here is a box one meter long, forty-two centimeters wide, and thirty deep. But where will we put it? Here. Inside a tomb in the middle of the church. Now, the dead man is accompanied by eight centuries of history and several more corpses: the bones of the Counts of Urgell.
The secret passed from mouth to mouth and never left the mouth. Towns are safes of memory and skin. But in 1967 they came out. The bones of the counts go from Vilanova de la Sal to the monastery of Avellanas. In 1967, it was cloned in 1166, when the counts of Urgell, Ermengol VII and Dolça de Foix, founded the abbey of Bellpuig de les Avellanes from the fragments. In the midst of Franco's regime, it seems like we're back in the Middle Ages. Just an unknown detail of a collective madness that runs from peasants to nobility. In the castle of Ràpita, on the banks of Balaguer, a funeral meal was held (for the digestion of the dead!) and the flag of the county of Urgell was usually raised. Hallucinate: a drawn sword with a cake of revenue. The bones returned home, but their backs hurt.
First, in 1906, Josep Utgé broke his back grabbing them piece by piece, against the clock. Before their beds leave, their spirit: the tombs of the Counts of Urgell. The owner of the Les Avellanes Monastery, the banker Agustí Santesmasses, has sold them to an antique dealer in Vitoria. And they will end up in New York, in The Cloisters Museum. Very brutal. The people cry out to heaven and weep on earth. Our dead have been sold. The most luminous faces of Catalan Gothic art horizontally. One of the peaks of political, artistic, genetic history: the Catalonia of the Counts. They have been sold to us. No one has ever rested. But one day the crying stopped.
Tears became life: we are the bits, the digits, of the life that never dies. Since 2016, a project conceived by the Lleida Provincial Council and the Les Avellanes Monastery has begun Operation Cloned Return. First, scan the tombs that exist in New York. Then, reconstruct them in Catalonia. The Yankees have hallucinated cuttlefish meatballs with the pioneering Catalan technology of the technologist artisans of La Garrotxa, with Francesc Montero at the helm. They've never done it before. And now we have Viscount Álvaro II. Count Álvaro I and Countess Cecilia de Foix, ready. And then Count Ermengol X will come. Bodies return in 3D and bones resurrect.
We are facing a new planetary and national language. The United States-Catalonia dialogue. The New York-Avellanes conversation. They have the royal sarcophagi, but we have the memory, the history. Hardware and software. Everyone needs each other to understand. The birth of a new diplomacy to resolve museum and heritage battles. Inside the boxes is everything: the past and the future. We will be a nation through cloning. We will be a world through pollution. But we will be fighting: this is the Game of Thrones. The war is between you and me. The Counts of Urgell knew this when they decided to bury themselves in Avellanes: capital of the eternity of life.