The art of reassembling knowledge to repair a park
Mediator Fran Quiroga's reflection on the six-year process of 'Legado Cuidado'.
Heritage can be a set of material elements and technologies that shape it and also the result of an immaterial link with the communities that surround it, giving it meaning. The Parque del Pasatiempo in Betanzos, Galicia, is as well as the «craziest theme park in Europe«, The project is a referential space for the inhabitants of this locality, where there is a very close relationship between the community and this material resource. Working from that link has great potential because what is created emerges from that love. Devising projects from that place is a strategy in the face of disillusionment or apathy, bearing in mind that the Parque del Pasatiempo is the story of a disenchantment; it has been closed since 2018 and with the burden of a highly questioned process of recovery and rehabilitation, where there have been processes of speculation and idleness among many of the agents who should have participated in its custody and safeguarding.
The fall of the pavilion of the Retiro Pond in the Pasatiempo in 2018 was the trigger for a strong mobilisation in this Galician town. Although the park was already very degraded, as anyone who visited it could see, this crumbling was the perfect metaphor: everything was collapsing. It was civil society, through its mechanisms of political enunciation, that demanded greater care for an exceptional heritage asset. To argue that something should be safeguarded is not just a matter for heritage experts, but must be endorsed by society itself, which, through its values or as an exercise of civic co-responsibility, determines what should or should not remain in time.
The fact that the ‘Asociación de Amigos do Parque do Pasatempo’ promoted a demonstration and managed to summon approximately 200 people on 25 May 2019 shows the social concern about a park as enigmatic as the Pasatiempo. The citizens, at last, took the lead in reclaiming an asset they consider their own, thus breaking the social and political neglect (which usually go hand in hand) that accompanied the care of the park.
This trigger becomes an event, understood not as “the solution of a problem, but the opening of possibilities”, as Lazzarato (2006,45) would say. Although the Italian thinker refers to movements such as those in Seattle and the anti-globalisation movements, here we are dealing with a local event. It is an event of great significance for many of our neighbours. To think of the minor is to do justice to what affects many on the periphery, on the margin. From that day until today, the Parque del Pasatiempo has been declared an ‘Asset of Cultural Interest’ (BIC), the highest figure of heritage protection in Spain, the pond has been rehabilitated, and the Master Plan for the Pasatiempo has been developed. Paradoxically, and despite living in an increasingly digital world, this plan can only be consulted in the offices of the Xunta de Galicia. In addition to all these actions, since 2018 Concomitentes, together with a good number of allies, has initiated the participatory artistic project called Legado Cuidado (Legacy of Care).
From the process, Concomitants as an interface to enable wishes to materialise
Concomitentes, as well as being a non-profit organisation, is also an interface, an intermediate space between citizens and what concerns them, facilitating methodologies and economic resources for the materialisation of this collective desire. In October 2019 we announced on the Concomitentes website the first public conference of the project.
We stated that “from October 2019 to 2021 an artistic intervention project will be carried out that seeks to turn civil society into the promoter of a work of art”. It was not two, but five years, with a pandemic in between and several difficulties. It was not always understood why it should be the citizens who led this process. In addition to the ‘Asociación Amigos del Parque del Pasatiempo’, the ‘ACLP Roxín Roxal’ and the ‘Asociación Amigos del Casco Histórico de Betanzos’ joined the project, as well as the collaboration of the Concello de Betanzos and the Asociación Gabinete de Imaxinación, an entity federated with Concomitentes for the local development of this process.
The initial proposal was if a town, Betanzos, could make an artistic commission around the legacy of the García Naveira brothers., with all the complexity that this entailed, as it implied talking about heritage, memory, education, return, wealth or plundering. This is why we opted for a Participatory Action Research that facilitated methodologies and pedagogies of encounter so that the citizens could generate an artistic commission that gathered the collective desire that the artist had to materialise through a work of art. In this phase of listening, methodologies such as the ‘Walking Conversation’, the ‘Café Dialogue’, drawing, music and the party itself. In addition to doing it with neighbours, we did it with people and allies such as the ‘Rexenerando’ cooperative, which facilitated the sessions, and the participation of many guests who accompanied us and helped to generate the collective desire production machine that was this process, as the poet Lara Dopazo said of one of the participatory sessions.
A work of art as an act of reparation
Steven Jackson argues that there are two radically different realities in the world: “on the one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, a world almost always falling apart. On the other hand, a world in a constant process of fixing and reinventing, reconfiguring and reassembling new combinations and new possibilities”.” (1), Hence, Concomitentes worked from the point of view of repair as that subtle care of maintenance and transformation, which would be the fulcrum between the two worlds. That is to say, the artistic intervention did not only seek to rehabilitate the park, but to start from a genealogy in order to reassemble new futures from the present. We were interested in the repair because we not only focused on the year 0 of the construction, but also on everything that the abandonment, the subsequent speculation and the constant mutation of the park have entailed. The reparation proposal also allows us to highlight what was silenced, such as the water and its course. It could be a restitution that recovers the lost original, eliminating an athletics track, a football pitch and an area for playing petanque, but we prefer to situate ourselves in the place of that curative policy that does not seek to overthrow, reform or return to the old; nor does it believe in a miraculous leap towards the new and radically liberated. It reassembles, reinvents and remakes. It re-pairs, following Yifan Wang and Changwen Chen's assertion that “a politics of repair is a politics of healing”.” (2).
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(1) Jackson, S. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair”. in Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, eds P. Tarleton Gillespie. Cambridge (Mas): MIT Press. Pp 222.
(2) https://www.e-flux.com/journal/146/613173/the-unauthorized-repair-of-the-world/
The project is located in the Pasatiempo Park, which is a special space that has a very important symbolic value and great prestige in the Galician artistic imaginary, as it is one of the great monuments to emigration. Throughout the public sessions, more than 200 neighbours participated and demanded that the final work should address the future of this park and all the memory that permeates it, as well as overcoming the idea of monumentality and the epic, or that the artistic proposal should hinge on the axes of legacy, identity and the idea of the unfinished, as well as rejecting that the intervention should be strictly ephemeral.
Under this premise, it was Carme Nogueira the selected artist. Her artistic career has been marked by working with processes of subjectivisation and the normalising function of spaces through research processes. Her concerns are related to intimacy, public and domestic space, urban spaces and gender with devices and actions that activate spectators, promoting other narratives. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Salamanca and a PhD from the University of Vigo. She has held residencies in, among others, Witte Rook (Breda, 2020), Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao 2017) and PROGRAM (Berlin 2010).
Thus, Carme Nogueira's artistic intervention includes seven modular pieces of recycled cement that recreate a canal in the lower part of the park, highlighting the connection between the two parts of the park through water. The formalisation of the intervention consists of a series of 7 modular pieces measuring 150 x 100 x 67cm, which seek to dialogue with the lost parts of the Fountain of Neptune, which formed part of that canal. They want to set themselves up, fictionally, in the mould of the lost pieces, in their negative. As if the fountain had dissolved and its remains had been distributed throughout the territory, but converted into its negative, its mould.
The production of the works, has been commissioned to the Rodiñas company, specialising in large cement installations. The pieces have been created using leftover cement from other works. In addition to the production of these artistic pieces, a landscape intervention has been created by Iñigo Segurola, The proposal adds a dense planting as a screen to the enclosure and billboards to the existing football pitch. His proposal adds a dense planting as a screen towards the enclosure and billboards of the existing football pitch. Among other natural elements, the proposal includes: 4 units of sequoia, 8 units of palm trees or 29 Japanese banana trees. An area of 1200 square metres has been intervened, mobilising more than 400 cubic metres of earth, which has meant the renaturalisation of a degraded area annexed to the football pitch.
The project has also benefited from the technical assistance of the architect Carmen Calatayud, the professor of architecture at the University of A Coruña, José Manuel Vázquez Mosquera, and the archaeological team Arbore, as well as the company's production ARCE for the garden. The project has also received favourable reports from various governmental bodies and the approval of the full City Council for the transfer of the work and its subsequent maintenance.
Finally, the project, which is nothing more than a citizen's contribution to the care of a park, has gained the support of the Deputación de A Coruña and the Xunta de Galicia, The Spanish Presidency has also supported the Spanish Presidency's support for the EU Council and the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation, The main funder of this project, which has cost more than 70,000 euros.
Once again, thanks to all the people who have made it possible to fulfil this dream we had in 2019. Finally, we would like to echo what asked Angel Arcay, neighbour and client, in 2021, who hoped that the final work “will remember how the whole process was experienced together, but above all to ensure that people who, even if they did not participate in the whole process, come down to the Pasatiempo and know that this work is a community work and that it forms part of the park”, let us hope that this will be the case.
