Participant’s review Geotales Workshop Madrid

During the day and half workshop a creative chain reaction came along specially focused on ideas related with water as a way to create our own subjective map. After a few hours dedicating ourselves to research and discussion about a possible theme for a project: trying out water drawing, searching for possible stories, fictional and real, and ways of action. A decision had to be made and finally we realized that the interest was obviously oriented to the invisibility of the water in Móstoles.

After years of protest and claims made by the people, in 1980 (in some references 1982) the water supplied by the canal Isabel II finally arrived to the village of Móstoles, a small town nearby Madrid. Before the canal Isabel II came,

Project: Water in Mostoles, (temporary title)

By Carla Capeto and Jose Luis Pajares (gelo)

Based on short but effective research on Mostoles Carla Capeto and Jose Luis Pajares decided on the subject of water as central theme. Subsequently they followed two slightly different paths in their artistic approach.

Water as graffiti tool

First they focused on experiments with water as a tool for graffiti that, in its temporary qualities reminded of the temporal, perishable quality of tracks and traces. This way graffiti could be used as a very gentle and poetic story telling tool, that also describes the space on the spot, in a more or less abstract manner, without permanent altering or damage the place. The drawings could be fixed though by using existing locative media tools: combing geotagged photography and video, GPS-tracks and writing. Based on this realization Carla and Gelo decided

Looking back, an overview of the workshop

The workshop, though relatively short, was an intense few days in which I was glad to get to know our participants better. We had an interesting group that was already quite knowledgeable on the subject of mapping. Carla for instance pointed us to some works we hadn’t seen before in which the links between text and location was explored, called 21 steps. Funnily enough it was Gelo who later came up with visualpin, which did much the same but for video.

Our first meeting on thursday

Not wanting to waste time we first met in the hotel Paseo del Arte’s lobby on thursdaynight to have a first round of introductions. We had a cup of tea and discussed the backgrounds of the participants, ending with some homework: Carla and Gelo would also give a little presentation about some works they mentioned this first night.

Presentation of workshop results

waterdrawing experiments

We started to do some experiments on the roof of CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo

The canal Isabel II pipe system

waterdrawing script

Looking for a starting point

Looking for a very temporal and clean way to draw and write freely in the city of Móstoles, we realize that we could use just water, instead of other materials like chalk or graffiti. With water we will make hiper-temporal interventions all over the streets, and documented it with photos and video.

We discovered that Móstoles celebrate every 15th May a a party called “Día del Agua”. This party remembers the day when the water arrives cleaner to the city in the 80s through the huge “Canal de Isabel II” (The Canal have their own foundation devoted also to art). This is a very nice video about its water structures (wow 3D included):

Another information sources are this article from Emilio Guerra about the history of the Canal, another one from El Pais newspaper with a short introduction of the recent history of Móstoles, these maps and graphics of the Canal in Móstoles, and this technical article.

Lets see what else we find..

geotales Madrid

Today we started our Geotales workshop in Madrid.

It takes place in the cotentext of Rencontres Internationales

We work at A2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo