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New cultural landscapes

Archaeological method as artistic practice
Bárbara Fluxá

These images belong to a multidisciplinary art project called ‘Submerged cultural landscape’
which was carried out in Zamora (Castille, Central Spain) during 2011. The work intends to
examine our illusions about the construction of the past as a way of finding our identity in the
present, questioning the modern obsession with recovering memory as the result of an ancestral
fear of oblivion. For this, I start from a conception of time that is not just phenomenological or
historical, but related to recent work on space, maps, geographies, frontiers, commercial routes
and migrations. The creation of new cultural landscapes through the modification of the envi-
ronment is, and has always been, a socially conflictual issue, despite the evident anthropization
of nature from the beginnings of humankind.
The reservoir of La Almendra is a good example of these problems: behind its powerful and
ambiguous appearance as a natural landscape, since 1967 the reservoir has concealed under its
waters the village of Argusino and with it a history of social, political, economic and cultural
conflict, today still unresolved. With this work, I intend to make evident the difficult task of
re-codifying the images of these villages, which are loaded with traumatic memories. Pitted
against them and their little stories stand progress and technological advance, which force us to
prioritize those projects that satisfy the growing demand for energy resources, supply water for
agriculture and people, and produce new landscapes for tourist consumption.
The images of the submerged village shown in these pages have been captured through
techniques of echoacoustic engineering (bathymetry and sonography), commonly used in
under­water archaeological survey. Thanks to these methods I have been able to record from
the surface of the reservoir and with great fidelity the present appearance of Argusino under the
waters of the ‘Sea of Castille’, as the reservoir has been popularly known for the last forty-five
years.

www.barbarafluxa.blogspot.com
© Photographs: Bárbara Fluxá, Cecilia Sancho, CECAF. Acknowledgements: Ingeniería
­Tecmarin1990 SL

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