Hydroreflexivity - e-flux

Editors Diogo Aguiar, Nick Axel, Andreia Garcia, Nikolaus Hirsch, Ana Neiva

Contributors Álvaro Domingues, Ameneh Solati, Ifor Duncan, Ana Salgueiro, Eglantina Monteiro, Emanuele Coccia

Every environment, every place is shaped by water: by the way it is situated and used; by how it is protected, managed, and distributed; by the conditions of its accessibility; by its quality, and by its quantity. Water can be both a protector and a threat, and the struggles over water can be both for and against it.

Hydroreflexivity is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “Fertile Futures,” the Portuguese Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia curated by Andreia Garcia with Ana Neiva and Diogo Aguiar.

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7 essays

Don’t Call Me Gaia

Emanuele Coccia

The present conditions we are experiencing—and trying to designate with different names, all equally inadequate: Anthropocene, climate crisis, Capitalocene, etc.—are unprecedented, not only from a historical or ecological point of view, but also and especially from a cognitive and political point of view.

Irrigation and a Critical Awareness of Land

Eglantina Monteiro

The construction of the Santa Clara dam (1963–73) on the Mira River created a 12,000-hectare “irrigation perimeter” for hydro-agricultural exploitation along a 41-kilometer strip of Portuguese coast in the southwest of Alentejo, between Vila Nova de Milfontes and the village of Rogil.

Water Flows, Stones Take…

Ana Salgueiro

Only a few hours after the heavy rain began, water and detritus overflowed and destroyed the stream banks of the island’s principal localities. Taking back areas of unduly occupied flood plain, torrents of water swept away everything in its path.

Necro-Hydrology

Ifor Duncan

For the fathers of the dam, a masterpiece of Italy’s rapid post-war industrialization, Paolini stated that there is an eerie sense that the mountain collapsed, but the dam—sculpted to a morbid perfection—survived the ensuing landslide. Casting a great shadow into the ravine, Vajont now stands as a tomb to the megalomania of hydropower engineering.

Wetlands of Resistance

Ameneh Solati

Draining the Marshes In the mid-1970s, a forty-five-minute-long documentary film by Kassem Hawal titled Al-Ahwar (The Marshes) presented a window i…

Troubled Waters: An inquiry into water’s modes of existence

Álvaro Domingues

In founding mythologies of the world, water can be the beginning or the destruction of everything; fertility and creation; everything that existed before the ashes.

Editorial

Andreia Garcia, Ana Neiva, Diogo Aguiar, and e-flux Architecture

Hydroreflexivity is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “Fertile Futures,” the Portuguese Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia curated by Andreia Garcia with Ana Neiva and Diogo Aguiar.

Subject

Landscape, Water & The Sea, Agriculture

Contributors

Andreia Garcia, Ana Neiva, Diogo Aguiar, and e-flux Architecture Editorial
Álvaro Domingues Troubled Waters: An inquiry into water’s modes of existence
Ameneh Solati Wetlands of Resistance
Ifor Duncan Necro-Hydrology
Ana Salgueiro Water Flows, Stones Take…
Eglantina Monteiro Irrigation and a Critical Awareness of Land
Emanuele Coccia Don’t Call Me Gaia

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Subject