Capriccio by Alonso & Crippa

Un borde (im)posible de Buenos Aires

“(…) The inhabitants of a territory never cease to erase and rewrite upon the old book of the ground. […] The territory, filled with traces and forced readings, resembles a palimpsest more than anything else (…)”¹

We describe the edge of Buenos Aires from a timeless perspective, one that weaves connections between history and the present in order to imagine an (im)possible future.
Through a selection of historical maps and remarkable projects for the city, a series of boundary lines are traced—revealing the transformation of the shifting threshold between water and land over the past centuries. This document simultaneously draws from factual and imagined sources of the city.

Using the figures of the palimpsest and the capriccio, it constructs a record that overlays layers and blurs the limits between reality and fiction. Like ancient navigation maps—built from both abstract and figurative representations—the cartographic record intertwines with visualizations of an atemporal and (im)possible edge of the city.

The map operates as an artifact that does not crystallize a fixed state of things but rather enables us to understand (or navigate) a transforming territory, building it even as it is being described—revealing realities once invisible or unimaginable.