Cel rogent, pluja o vent

As the Catalan saying goes, “Red sky, rain or wind.” If the sky “burns” at sunset, something is about to change; rain, wind, or both are on their way. It’s a form of inherited popular meteorology, reading the sky and anticipating the weather through the light and the suspended particles it holds. Moisture or dust in the atmosphere reflect red more intensely, signaling a shift in weather conditions. Like those particles, we too follow traces that announce transformation.

In Joan Llort’s work, the ashes of a wildfire produce “pyrogenic aerosols” that travel from scorched land to the ocean, where they fertilize plankton ecosystems. Like proverbs, ashes circulate too: they precipitate, settle, and transform the landscapes they touch. This project responds to Joan’s research by metaphorically embodying those ashes: we let ourselves be carried like wandering particles drifting through landscapes, bodies, and scales, allowing the territory to speak through us.

The fact that one of us could not be physically present in the territory became a methodological opportunity that transformed our way of working. This absence led us to adopt hybrid strategies, combining different scales of perception and recording. On one hand, we used remote sensing technologies, collecting field recordings, environmental data, and testimonies from a distance. On the other, we incorporated tools from autoethnography, understood as an embodied methodological practice, as proposed by Tami Spry—a way of knowing that begins with the body, experience, and subjectivity.

From there, we moved from isolated events to broader structures—from the wildfire as an event to the pyroecological regime—understanding that fires, agricultural decisions, and everyday gestures are all part of a deeper, more complex political and ecological fabric. Fire can no longer be understood as a mere event. It burns beyond the matter it consumes. It is more than a destructive moment: it is a regime. An undeclared system of governance, operating through repetition, through the habit of burning. In this shift, fire ceases to be only a natural phenomenon and becomes a political operator, an epistemic device, a way of making visible the absences and demands of those who inhabit a territory. Each fire traces a new topography of memory. It is not only about what fire destroys, but what it reveals: an ecology of what burns—and what is allowed to burn—that exposes the margins of the human, the technical, and the affective. Fire is not an accident. It is a symptom, a language, an unanswered question.

During our drift through the Priorat region, we accumulated layers of knowledge from widely different sources: from scientific to popular, and from embodied experiences of place. In our encounters with various agents human and more-than-human—we collected situated ways of understanding the landscape and its management, where fire is not only a catastrophe but also technology, memory, or threshold.

With Dani, a Colombian shepherd slowly traversing the livestock trail with his flock, we came to see transhumance as a situated technology—a form of knowledge that questions the logics of efficiency imposed on the land. With Sara, a winemaker, we learned to read burnt soil as a device of memory: her decision to bottle the smoked grapes after the 2015 wildfire turned the wine into a material witness of the fire—an interscalar technology that crosses soil, plant, and body. And with Roser, a territorial host and caretaker of networks, we shared meals and long sobremesas where proverbs, forgotten words, and gestures of care emerged—forms of exercising sovereignty through listening, language, and hospitality.

From these interactions arose the proposal of a new territorial proverb collection—not as a closed archive of folk sayings, but as a dynamic device for the circulation of situated knowledge. A “Pyroproverb Collection of the Priorat” that gathers the ashes as they precipitate and settle—not as passive residue, but as fertile traces of another way of understanding territory.

We understand the proverb collection as a document in pursuit of sovereignty and self-esteem for a land. In its traditional form, a proverb collection is already an intermedial technology: it collects oral knowledge sedimented through time, between writing, voice, and collective memory. Our proposal builds on this logic to imagine an updated collection—not only preserving past knowledge, but also putting different epistemologies—popular, scientific, embodied—into relation, and activating a network of diverse agents coexisting in the landscape.

The Pyroproverb Collection of the Priorat does not aim to compile proverbs as isolated units, but to propose a polyhedral model—one capable of reading the territory through its multiple scales, voices, and temporalities. In this gesture, the proverb becomes a vehicle of agency: a living tool to name what resists, what tends, what burns, and what remains.