CORTE (Ponte da Mucela/PT, 2017)
Landscape intervention carried out during the InSitu3 residency “Left of Centre” in Ponte da Mucela, Portugal.
Ponte da Mucela is a village in central Portugal whose name derives from an old Roman bridge and road that once existed there. This road, which runs through the village, used to be a busy route connecting the region with central Spain. Around the 2000s, a modern motorway was built to bypass the village, causing the old road to fall into disuse. Since then, Ponte da Mucela has undergone a continuous process of depopulation and abandonment, and today is home to only around 50 people. While bearing the consequences of this neglect, the place also preserves particular landscapes and ways of life, like a kind of timeless reliquary.
Corte symbolically erases the road leading to the village by covering it with leaves and soil. A no-man’s-land is artificially created over the asphalt, with the aim of preserving the place’s peculiar relationship with time and pushing the imaginary of abandonment to an extreme. Through this small gesture, a strange fictional scene is produced, questioning the relationship between human-built structures and forces beyond the human.
The intervention can also be read as the introduction of a “wild pause”, suspending the utility and presence of human infrastructure. One might say it almost “destitutes” the road, allowing the uninterrupted circulation of other things and forms of life. A different kind of infrastructure, made of vibrant and living matter, always in motion, is constructed here through a more-than-human form of care. Soil Works.
(Text written by Flora Paim and Alberto Altés for the exhibition Wild Care: Architectures of Love and Correspondence, Porto Design Biennale 2021, Museu da Cidade, Porto, Portugal.)
