in:
El Parque del Agua / The Water Park / Le Parc de l´Eau
Authors: Iñaki Alday, Margarita Jover,Christine Dalnoky

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A tale with two ideas and an acknowledgement / Javier Peña 2008

 

The morning was chilly. They arranged their belongings and noted how the north wind was easing and that the day was probably going to be quite bearable. They put into their backpacks all the items they thought would be useful for the first reconnaissance. They went out on to the street and saw how day was breaking, although it was still cold.  Their footsteps sounded on the hard city pavement and were mixed with the sweeping sounds of the brooms of the street cleaners. They continued walking in almost total silence.

 

They arrived at a spot the city had forgotten. It was a place that had also been overlooked by the open, wilder territory and the farm lands.

 

The two explorers began to walk once more; now their footsteps no longer resounded. Instead they were soft, cushioned steps; the mud and the seeds stuck to their boots.

 

As the wind died down, they both saw that the leaves of the trees that colonised the landscape were becoming motionless and, as the sun climbed higher in the sky. The leaves then began to vibrate in its light, intensifying the shadows on the ground under their feet.

 

They realised that there was a presence around them. They also noticed how the birds that had built their nests in the trees moved around them, telling them this place was special. The two set out to discover what it was.

 

They followed the footpaths, which once had been farm tracks, and the irrigation ditches that were now the only tell tale signs that fields had ever existed there. They continued onwards and suddenly felt they were in a special place. As they continued forwards they discovered something they already knew – a river, which had once covered the ground they were walking on.

 

That morning, the river was calm. There was little water and it seemed almost not to flow. However everything that surrounded them bore witness to the seasonal force of the river, capable of becoming a terrible and brutal surge to destroy the works made by years of farming, or to tear out trees from its banks and carry them away.

 

The imprint left by the river on that place showed them that the limits defining that place – the city and the river – were in fact undefined. It was a blurred and changing line that had never been constant and, for this reason, they had to discover the laws that had shaped it.

 

In their backpacks they carried some maps and photos, but gradually, as they were walking and discovering the area, they realised these were not enough.

 

The maps did not show the phenomenology of the territory – the changing nature of the site. Instead they showed a static state that the explorers knew did not exist. So they began to draw on the maps and photos, they started to take notes, to write, to assess the change; to redraw the lines that clearly structured the place.

 

When they arrived home, they spread out their notes on long tables. They studied them, each standing on different sides of the table, and wrote down recollections that had not been able to draw. New drawings began to appear. These new drawings were their own maps that aimed to chart the special and unique characteristics of that place.

 

The next day they got up and thought, “We have to go back. We must find more signs, more imprints and more information… We must create a compass with which we can guide ourselves over this landscape.”

 

Upon returning, they found it was fundamental to determine the main agent operating in that place.
It was water.

 

Water was the backbone of the place, it was evident; they saw it in everything. It was present in the lay
of the land, in the way the tracks and irrigation channels were laid, in the differences in relief, in the
river itself that ran slowly, bending itself around in an attempt to find the maximum slope with which to flow more quickly. It was the main agent and it was also going to be their main ally – a vital, strong and active ally, but also changing and fluid one. It was an agent whose maximum strength was its capacity
for transformation.

 

Although tired, both explorers knew that the end was coming and that in no time at all this landscape
would be taken from them to become a new urban development with new uses. It would be an opportunity for a new life that would not go unnoticed by the rest of the world or by other explorers who would try to work in the territory, with other tools, with different interests. The other explorers would try to develop the idea of using data provided by the land – the real meaning of infrastructures – to bring forth that new life,
in contrast with the simple application of rootless, generic uses.

 

For these reasons, all other explorers would like to thank them for being capable of carrying out this work in such a precise and meticulous manner, but also coherently with the sensitivity for the land that makes us all think that it is possible to pinpoint and redirect the barbarian logic of the devastated territory we live on.