Like a découpage, thought settled over fragments of brick, mortar, and bent iron, and the myriad of elements became substrate — a hydroponic support for the organic mantle where plants took root. Thought and substrate are one and the same.¹
The Río de la Plata is a small sea with a muddy bed, an old port, and an improper landscape. It is a primal Eden painted in oil, grainy black-and-white photographs, and a water mirror for the ever-hard edge of the city of Buenos Aires.²
Just as inland it was necessary to make a desert to conquer the filled, this estuary is forced to be a river. “Estuary” is too transitional, unstable, and inexpressible a condition for a city that perceives itself as the head of an emerging nation.
The failed, abandoned, or insufficient attempts to operate its shore cannot be read without considering the persistently patriarchal gesture of rectifying, hardening, and permanently expanding its edge.
“To turn one’s back on the river” is a poetic expression — for both the back and the river. It reveals the European mind’s disorientation before the South American reality.
The intensity with which the coast is asserted and its slope operated upon is directly proportional to the vigor with which the watercourses that fill the wetlands of this liminal land — between the Paraná basin and the Marginal Forest — are erased.
The non/river is a memory of the beach and an imagination of a seaside city, that body of water that once served as recreation and is now merely decorative. It is also the most frustrated identity signifier, constantly evoked yet never enacted.
Along the much-invoked “coastline,” from the ever-changing slope emerged the stairway device — a necessary connection between surfaces of different densities: water and solid ground.
As a by-product of the city’s organic will, obstinate in cycling through five centuries, another device emerged (or submerged): rubble — the substrate over which the compost of the sudestada drains and aerates the native vegetation.
For beyond and before Pompeii³, flooding is a regional scale in which water bathes an entire basin⁴ to bring closer the sediment we call sand.
The city fixes the sand. On a microscopic scale: an indispensable “aggregate” in reinforced concrete, only to dismantle it in the next geological season.
We ask ourselves: what would the landscape of our city look like if we had recognized as a fundamental task the role of the washerwomen, if we had allowed the free flow of waters, if we had preserved the marginal forest, if the relief could be distinguished on the horizon? How would children play in the meanders bathed by the flood?
The Río de la Plata is the place where the city was born — before the water became a river. The river is an old place, the oldest in this part of the world. It is where we exude our waste and where we imagine ourselves as fluvial citizens, elusive coastal dwellers; it is where we constitute ourselves as hydrosocial subjectivities, despite our reluctance for liquid contact with the brown waters of the Plata.
