Sanson Postindustrial Landscape

A twelve square meter collage and painting was chosen as a metaphorical allegory to represent the creative process of an architectural intervention on an abandoned cement factory and the reflection on the contemporary treatment of industrial ruins and landscape.

Set on the hillside of the mountain range, it is a sublime and photogenic space. The broken parts and the desolated surrounding areas needed to be carefully analyzed in order to create a landscape redesignation where the industrial ruin, nature and new uses could coexist. The project is presented as a tableau de bataille. The French term refers to the long canvas used in the past to explain a war by binding different scales and scenes together. The highest value of the project is the discovery of aesthetic and potential value on this area; thus its representation had to be a form of art. Just as the project is about the intervention on a pre-existence, so this presentation is a support intervened, manipulated, transformed. On how to deal with the postindustrial, a distinction between what had to be preserved and what had to be demolished was done. A museological preservation of the emblematic elements is proposed, and on the remaining 13,000 square meters a plan of intervention by phases is established to get to appropriate them as spaces for the city, publicly managed for social and cultural uses. About the treatment of the landscape, the chosen position is to re-naturalize the arid environment and to use vegetation as a scenographic tool. In the same way, the tableau is a single set; and also contains a narrative and a visual tour, with moments of doubt and surprise. The tableau emphasizes also another type of natural phenomenon; the creative. The pictorial technique chosen -acrylic on paper- blurs the whole by imposing a layer of irrationality that unites the objective elements; the plans and photographs. Eventually, every tableau replaces the real battle. It is the only image that can portray what happened; and we have to trust it to understand the story it tells.