Coordinates 2

There is something in the sight of a refinery that still awes us. As if industrialization, engineering in a large scale had not been really assumed by our gaze yet and we are strongly fascinated by human capacity to create those real and at the same time fiction spaces where human beings don’t exist and their presence looks ghostly.

When Núria Anguren asked me to write about the “Polígon Negre” project, I guess I felt the same attraction she felt when she chose the subject. There is both hate and fascination, a stronger hate for sure but the attraction is related to an image that belongs to my personal imaginary, my childhood, the place where we live. A forever changing sky, a permanent undefined odour and paths that inevitably force you to never avoid having a look. There is a physical aspect that projects us into the future, the same future 40 years since; it was futurist from a start and we still have the same feeling. An indescribable place, mute and noisy, which creeks, trembles or sweats, but each of its movements and stages forces us to observe it, to think about it, never unnoticed, always present in our minds, conversations and bodies that have grown up with the place, bodies that have been modified and rot nearby. Bodies that acknowledge it is there and although they despise the place, go on living there with the impunity it has always known how to obtain.

Physically it shows the beauty of work combined with natural elements, it deceives us with spectacular shows to sweeten the agony. It plays with the wind a wind that carries its scent, almost always in the same direction telling us what kind of activity is going on at that moment.

Fire, wild and hellish, loud and hot at the same time, when night comes it drives us to hell, a dehumanized hell with hard shapes and warm lights that come together with an anguishing fearful sound. Water becomes big vapour clouds drawing on a cloudy sky, blurring the landscape and producing short-lived huge structures seen from afar. And the deserted earth has no existence, without voice or vote it is only the stand, just a modified base where the industry is supported, a stand that has never been listened to, it has even been silenced.

And what do we get in exchange? What is the currency that makes us tolerate that monster made of pipes, iron and fire? Plastic, lots of plastic that come from black oil and by-products. A huge evil imposed as unavoidable. We consume in a massive way everything they produce, is there a way back? Are we able to fight against it, when our every day life is surrounded by everything that belongs to them? I think they know it is utopic, and that’s their strength. But it is never useless to think it over, represent it and think it over again. Those are the seeds that remain, they go down deep and make us see and experience truth from other points of view.

Vanessa H. Sánchez