--- title: "Mutual aid and collective work: years recovering the “tornallom” and the project for an Ateneu Rural in the Penedès" url: https://emprius.cat/en/tornalloms-penedes/ description: "“It is fundamental to engage in an exercise of historical memory, recovering from oblivion and from subsumption into capitalism all those aspects of life…" datePublished: 2025-04-30T14:41:17.000Z dateModified: 2026-11-04T13:28:43.905Z language: en publisher: "Fundació Emprius" categories: ["Communalism", "Community", "Heritage", "Ruralism"] --- # Mutual aid and collective work: years recovering the “tornallom” and the project for an Ateneu Rural in the Penedès *Published: 2025-04-30 · Updated: 2026-11-04* ![](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPPJKYM096APGS5D9Z29H.jpg) *“It is fundamental to engage in an exercise of historical memory to recover from oblivion and from subsumption into capitalism all those aspects of the lives of our grandmothers and grandfathers that had been built as part of collective work and management, which, in many cases, was self-management even beyond the reach of state logic.”* (Ponent Coopera, [“Els fils de la memòria i el treball a jova”](https://reconstruirelcomunal.suportmutu.org/memoria-treball-a-jova/), 2019) **“In the countryside, one helps the other”**, they used to say. Some still say it, and put it into practice. In rural areas, from time immemorial until not so long ago **\[1\]**, different forms and dynamics of **mutual aid** and **collective work** had been tremendously important. People would often help each other when hands were needed, based on a logic of **reciprocity**: you knew that today you helped whoever needed it, and tomorrow maybe you would need it too and would receive help from others. Many times, the **days of collective work** were organised and **planned**. There were days when people came together to do **collective work for the neighbours’ commons**: maintaining, repairing or building collective infrastructure. It was called, for example, “treball a jova” or “fer comú”. On other occasions, they would devote days of collective work in rotation to do **collective work for individuals**, helping different farms with the jobs that needed doing. They were called, for example, “tornallom” or “tornajornal”. You have to understand that, before the so-called “green revolution”, there were huge numbers of jobs in the countryside that made sense to do collectively. It was a very logical and necessary matter, but it had, moreover, very interesting components for strengthening the social fabric, the feeling of belonging and the “economic” relations in which moral criteria and the common good carried weight. ## Recovering the “tornallom” each week In the Penedès, for 15 years now, different networks of people have recovered the practice of the **tornallom**. At present, **every Wednesday** there is a network of people from **6 farmhouses** **in the region**, the two furthest about 25 kilometres apart. Each week one house is “the host”: it decides what job will be done, prepares whatever is needed to do it, cooks lunch for everyone, and receives the fruits of that work. For the first six years this network met irregularly, at times of grape harvest, pig slaughter, crop-gathering, mowing, sowing… And for nine years now they have been meeting weekly. One or two people from each house attend, and the host house rotates each week. Over lunch, they talk and plan the coming work days, as well as other shared projects and collective proposals, such as the gatherings of the [**Xarxa de la Terra**](https://web.archive.org/web/20250317102050/https://xarxaterra.noblogs.org/) network or, recently, the [**Ateneu Rural**](https://web.archive.org/web/20250313114434/https://calcisteller.noblogs.org/) project (an ateneu is a community social and cultural centre). Also in the same region, **every Monday**, another network of people from **10 houses in Font-rubí** meets, following the same logic. It includes quite varied profiles: a wide range of ages, people born and bred in the village and people who have moved there in recent years… During the Covid lockdown, people in the village felt the need to support each other and to have spaces to socialise. The idea came up of collectively encouraging **every house to have its own vegetable garden and chicken coop**, as a measure of self-sufficiency and food sovereignty, and of setting up a buying group to order different products collectively. With the collective momentum and enthusiasm, all these houses felt up to it, and so a second weekly tornallom dynamic emerged, built on the experience of the Wednesday one, in which one of the participating houses was from Font-rubí: [**Cal Cisteller**](https://web.archive.org/web/20250313114434/https://calcisteller.noblogs.org/). From this network have come very interesting projects, like a new small herd of goats that grazes around the village. When people meet, they do jobs like pruning, sowing, mowing, cleaning sheds or chicken runs, doing building work on the house, building, extending or repairing infrastructure, harvesting grapes, picking… Any job that can be done collectively and that the host farm proposes because it suits them. Moreover, right now, besides these two weekly days, some farms from the two tornalloms meet on other days bilaterally, as a two-way dynamic, to work weekly or fortnightly together, and thus help each other with jobs they are doing in common and can progress further and better by helping each other. It seems that the dynamic of mutual aid and collective work, when it works well, catches on and spreads. ## Learning and motivations. An initiative to replicate! These tornallom spaces are a very interesting way to learn diverse useful knowledge. Many of the people who participate, and who organise jobs often related to food production, do not come from farming families. Over the years they have learned from the other people who participated, through days of collective work and practice. According to the participants, it is **a dynamic that contributes a lot**, at different levels, beyond the work itself: spaces for **socialisation** and for building **bonds of friendship and trust**, a way of **getting to know people in the region**, which sometimes can lead to other initiatives, to **finding work**… One of the challenges that some of the participants mention is balancing this kind of collective work organisation with people’s waged working day. You have to have a flexible or reduced working day to be able to devote one day a week to working following this kind of community logic and mutual support. In this sense, they also mention that access to housing is a fundamental question, because having access to owned housing or housing at an affordable price is what allows you to devote more time and energy to working in these more community-based, self-sufficient ways. At Emprius we think that **these kinds of initiatives** – in this case mature experiences consolidated over several years – are very interesting and **should be made much more widely known**, so that more people might take steps towards setting up these kinds of dynamics and ways of living, of inhabiting the land, of relating and organising. Often, such initiatives don’t even cross our minds because **we lack examples**. ## Cal Cisteller: an Ateneu Rural project in the Penedès! With all this background in the region, of tornalloms, collective productive projects and community relations woven over the years, an [**Ateneu Rural**](https://web.archive.org/web/20250313114434/https://calcisteller.noblogs.org/) is being promoted in Font-rubí, taking advantage of the opportunity that has arisen to **collectively acquire ownership** **of Cal Cisteller**, one of the farms that has had the most prominent role in these processes over the years we have described. The aim is to create a multifunctional space, with a **housing section** and a **social and productive section**, that strengthens the network of mutual support between the farmhouses and can host and be a seed bank for new collective proposals that foster community bonds and consolidate projects already under way. The goal is to respond to the vital needs of the rural community, promoting community self-sufficiency and the common good. The concept of the “rural ateneu” was coined by this project, and it seems to be landing well – it fits perfectly to convey the spirit of everything the project wants to keep promoting. At Emprius we are **helping with the solidarity donation campaign** to make this collective purchase possible. You can find all the information here: ## [→ emprius.cat/calcisteller](https://emprius.cat/en/calcisteller/) ***NOTE:*** **\[1\]** On this subject, highly recommended are the article [**“L’ajut mutu com a previsió de la necessitat: continuïtats i canvis”**](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYWEF3NRZ5ZKAVN1BAJWQ4.pdf) (*Revista d’Etnologia de Catalunya*, 1997) and books like [**“El comú català. La història dels que no surten en la història”**](https://reconstruirelcomunal.suportmutu.org/el-comu-catala/) (David Algarra, 2015) and [**“L’economia social catalana als inicis del segle XX. Cooperació, solidaritat i valors”**](https://reconstruirelcomunal.suportmutu.org/economia-social-catalana-xx/) (Ignasi Faura Ventosa, 2016). Also some [**reflections on “els fils de la memòria”, agrarian associationism and “treball a jova”**](https://reconstruirelcomunal.suportmutu.org/memoria-treball-a-jova/) written by Ponent Coopera (“Al voltant de l’economia social i solidària” booklet, 2019). ## **Video about these tornalloms in the Penedès:** [YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVcOkjACYdU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVcOkjACYdU) *(You can find more videos on the* [*Cal Cisteller YouTube channel*](https://www.youtube.com/@AteneuRuralcalCisteller)*)* ## On the concept of “tornallom”: [YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=aXzQm6JZZio](https://youtube.com/watch?v=aXzQm6JZZio) [YouTube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mfBiAW9JpOo](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mfBiAW9JpOo) [YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDuBhPXbjwg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDuBhPXbjwg) ## **Photos of the tornalloms in the Penedès:** ![](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPQ7XFMN607MQDWWYRK4Q.jpg) ![Photos of the tornalloms in the Penedès](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPR36S35J8R19JD12BZRR.jpg) ![Photos of the tornalloms in the Penedès](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPRHZHPNPGDA0RZ6JAAKK.jpg) ![Photos of the tornalloms in the Penedès](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPRSD20MKZ2WKTVHSM64Z.jpg) ![WhatsApp Image 2025-03-14 at 12.42.19](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPS4MDGKQ9WXCMVGZBA0X.jpeg) ![Photos of the tornalloms in the Penedès](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYPPJKYM096APGS5D9Z29H.jpg) ## The “Let’s collectivise Cal Cisteller!” campaign: [YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DQSXmhsyPI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DQSXmhsyPI) ![donations abril25-2](https://emprius.cat/_emdash/api/media/file/01M6GYWEGB8XRAYP6HAH7GKD6E.jpg) --- Source: https://emprius.cat/en/tornalloms-penedes/