RH / WORKS / SCORES / EDITIONS

Viajes de Agua (Qanat)
2017. MediaLab-Prado, Madrid. Interactivos?'17 Re-imagining movement in the city: citizen science for a sustainable present

In collaboration with Beatriz Page Valero, Anna Katarina Martín, Hamilton Mestizo, Paola Roots, Virginia Díez Gobernado, Pedro Cortés Nieves, Mario Alzate López, Jonathan Ros, Antón Bermúdez and Camila Kuncar.

This project is a proposal to travel and walk through the streets of Madrid from a psycho-geographical conception and relationship between nature and urban architecture. It was formalized by creating a geo-location tool that allows to follow the course of subterranean water at a historical, conceptual and critical level. This device-work—composed of an interactive map, a portable laboratory for the analysis of air and water pollution, as well as a sound equipment—has the form of "capirote", a stone which is the visible part of the ancient “Viaje de Agua” (Water Journey), which ran through a series of underground galleries and supplied water to Madrid from the beginning of the 18th century to 1858, when the Canal Isabel II was inaugurated. It serves as a "zahorí" tool (an ancient tool to detect underground water) to detect, through geo-location, the old underground water channels and to direct us to the location of various squares where sources of water supply to the public were located that now have disappeared. Today Madrid has hardly any fountains left and the ones that exist serve a more decorative than social function. We demand through the walk and performative celebration, a more participatory, sustainable and respectful use of our squares, of our city.

2025 / info@raulhidalgo.net / IG