In the first days of 2020 the great german artist and friend Jo Pellenz visited the house of the dragon. He is an emerging contemporary artist in Cologne and also the son of a dynasty of winemakers.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, philosopher
Beside the artistic project to build a contemporary art museum (MUARCO) in the color garden of CASAdelDRAGON Jo donated his time and knowledge to the vines on the campus of the free University of informal education, which is part of the color garden.
To refresh the vines and bring back vitality for the next season Jo pruned a lot of brunches.
A selection of one year old brunches was packed with a mix of soil and sand in a bucket and placed in a dark corner inside a cellar.
When the wine offshoot will be expelled in the spring the new plants will be used for green walls around the building of the museum MUARCO.
To keep on growing vine in the area of Cervera del Maestre is connected to an very old local tradition of winemaking. Back in the year of 1987 we where able to buy 25 years old white wine in the wine cooperative in Sant Mateo. A few years later they closed the business because they harvested not enough grapes.
Old people told us a story about a local weather phenomenon: “There are 50 years more and more dry, followed by 50 years more and more wet.” In 1987 we started to rebuild the house of the dragon at the peek of “dry” and in the last years we arrived in the time of more and more rain. In 2018 we had two times flooding in the dry river in one month (October). In the dry period before 2000 we had summers in which it was prohibited to use water for construction.
The vines where moving to the mountains before 2012 and now – slowly they are returning to the lower part of “El Maestrazgo”.
Jo’s investment in keeping the old vines alive will give food to new generations of visitors in the color garden of the CASAdelDRAGON. This donation is giving with respect to the value of nature, without expectation, and by highlighting old traditions of farming.
Winemakers are thinking beyond their own lifetimes. They harvest what the grandfather was planting and they plant for their grand children.
Jo Pellenz, artist and former winemaker
Like the garden of Epikur the color garden is a social space. Sometimes people meet each other because they share the same moment in time at the same place, a lot of times the guests in Epikurs garden are just surrounded by the work of former contributors like Jo, and walk on top of a foundation, laid out by others years ago.