Legado Cuidado was a citizens’ contribution to the care of a park as enigmatic as the Pasatempo in Betanzos (Galicia). We carried it out alongside Concomitentes, the Spanish version of Nouveaux Commanditaires, together with a wide range of associations, public administrations and, above all, local residents.
Heritage can be a set of material elements and technologies that shape it, but also the result of an immaterial bond with the communities that surround it, giving it meaning. The Pasatempo Park in Betanzos, Galicia, is not only the “maddest theme park in Europe” but also a deeply meaningful space for the inhabitants of that town, where there is a very close relationship between the community and that material resource. Working from that bond has great potential because what is created emerges from love. Weaving projects from that place is a strategy against disillusionment and apathy, bearing in mind that Pasatempo Park is the story of a disappointment: it has remained closed since 2018, burdened by a highly contested recovery and rehabilitation process marked by speculation and neglect among many of the agents who should have participated in its custody and safeguarding.
The collapse of the bandstand at the Retiro Pond in the Pasatempo in 2018 was the trigger for a strong mobilisation in this Galician town. Although the park was already heavily degraded — as anyone who visited it could see — that collapse was the perfect metaphor: everything was falling apart. It was civil society, through its mechanisms of political enunciation, that demanded greater care for an exceptional heritage asset. Asserting that something must be safeguarded is not solely the domain of heritage experts; it must be endorsed by society itself, which is the one that, through its values and as an exercise in civic co-responsibility, determines what should endure over time and what should not.
The fact that the Asociación de Amigos do Parque do Pasatempo organised a demonstration and managed to bring together approximately 200 people on 25 May 2019 shows the social concern for a park as enigmatic as the Pasatempo. Citizens finally stepped forward to reclaim a resource they consider their own, breaking with the social and political neglect — which tend to go hand in hand — that had long accompanied the care of the park.
That trigger becomes an event, understood not as “the solution to a problem, but the opening of possibilities,” as Lazzarato (2006, 45) would say. Although the Italian thinker refers to movements such as Seattle and the anti-globalisation movements, here we find ourselves facing an entirely local event. It is a matter of great significance for many residents. Thinking about the minor is doing justice to what affects many people on the periphery, on the margins. From that day to the present, Pasatempo Park has been declared a Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC) — the highest level of heritage protection in Spain — the pond has been rehabilitated, and the Pasatempo Master Plan has been developed. Paradoxically, and despite living in an increasingly digital world, this plan can only be consulted at the offices of the Xunta de Galicia. In addition to all these actions, since 2018 we have been developing, through Concomitentes and alongside a number of allies, the participatory artistic project known as Legado Cuidado.
On the process: Concomitentes as an interface for making desires tangible
Concomitentes, as well as being a non-profit organisation, is also an interface — an intermediate space between citizens and what concerns them — providing methodologies and financial resources for the materialisation of collective desire. In October 2019 we announced on the Concomitentes website the first public session of the project.
We stated that “from October 2019 to 2021 an artistic intervention project will be carried out that seeks to turn civil society into the promoter of a work of art.” It was not two but five years, with a pandemic in between and numerous difficulties. It was not always understood why it should be citizens who led this process. The project was joined, in addition to the Asociación Amigos do Parque do Pasatempo, by the ACLP Roxín Roxal and the Asociación Amigos do Casco Histórico de Betanzos, as well as the collaboration of the Concello de Betanzos and the Asociación Gabinete de Imaxinación, an entity federated with Concomitentes for the local development of this process.
The initial proposal was whether a town — Betanzos — could commission an artistic work around the legacy of the García Naveira brothers, with all the complexity that entailed, since it meant addressing heritage, memory, education, return, wealth and plunder. This led to the choice of a Participatory Action Research approach that would provide methodologies and pedagogies of encounter, enabling citizens to generate an artistic commission that captured the collective desire which the artist would then materialise through a work. During that listening phase, methodologies such as the Walking Conversation, the Dialogue Café, drawing, music and festivity itself were employed. In addition to working with residents, we collaborated with allies such as the cooperative Rexenerando, which facilitated the sessions, and the participation of many guests who accompanied us and helped generate that machine for producing collective desire that this process became, as the poet Lara Dopazo described one of the participatory sessions.
A work of art as an act of repair
Steven Jackson argues that there exist in the world two radically different realities: “on one hand, a fractal world, a centrifugal world, a world almost always falling apart. On the other hand, a world in a constant process of fixing and reinvention, reconfiguration and reassembly of new combinations and new possibilities” (1). It was from this understanding that Concomitentes worked from repair as that subtle care of maintenance and transformation, which would be the fulcrum between both worlds. In other words, the artistic intervention was not seeking merely a rehabilitation of the park, but rather to depart from a genealogy in order to reassemble new futures from the present. We were interested in repair because we did not focus solely on year zero of construction, but on everything that abandonment, subsequent speculation and the park’s constant mutation had meant. The repair proposal also allows us to highlight what had been silenced, such as the water and its course. It could have been a restitution that recovered the lost original, removing an athletics track, a football pitch and a pétanque area, but we preferred to position ourselves from the place of that curative politics that neither seeks to overthrow, reform or return to the old, nor believes in a miraculous leap towards the new and radically liberated. It is reassembled, reinvented and remade. It is re-paired, following what Yifan Wang and Changwen Chen affirm: “a politics of repair is a politics of healing” (2).
The project is located in Pasatempo Park, a special space of great symbolic value and considerable prestige in the Galician artistic imagination, as one of the great monuments to emigration. Over the course of the public sessions, more than 200 residents participated, demanding that the final work should address the future of the park and all the memory that permeates it, that it should move beyond the idea of monumentality and the epic, that the artistic proposal should pivot on the axes of legacy, identity and the idea of the unfinished, and that the intervention should not be strictly ephemeral.
Under these premises, Carme Nogueira was the selected artist. Her artistic practice has been shaped by working with processes of subjectivisation and the normalising function of spaces through research processes. Her concerns relate to intimacy, public and domestic space, urban spaces and gender, through devices and actions that activate audiences and promote other narratives. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Universidad de Salamanca and a doctorate from the Universidad de Vigo. She has undertaken residencies at, among other spaces, Witte Rook (Breda, 2020), Bulegoa z/b (Bilbao, 2017) and PROGRAM (Berlin, 2010).
The artistic intervention by Carme Nogueira includes seven modular pieces of recycled concrete that recreate a canal in the lower part of the park, highlighting the connection between the two parts of the park through water. The intervention consists of a series of 7 modular pieces measuring 150 x 100 x 67 cm, which seek to enter into dialogue with the lost parts of the Neptune Fountain, which was part of that canal. They aspire, fictionally, to become the mould of the lost pieces, their negative. As if the fountain had dissolved and its remains had been distributed across the territory, transformed into their negative, their cast.
The production of the works was entrusted to the company Rodiñas, specialists in large-scale concrete installations. The pieces were created using concrete remnants from other works. In addition to the production of these artistic pieces, a landscape intervention was carried out by Iñigo Segurola, a well-known gardener and presenter of the television programme Bricomanía. His proposal adds a dense planting as a screen towards the enclosure and advertising hoardings of the current football pitch. Among other natural elements, the proposal includes 4 sequoia trees, 8 palm trees and 29 Japanese banana plants. The intervention covers an area of 1,200 square metres, mobilising more than 400 cubic metres of earth, resulting in the renaturalisation of a degraded area adjacent to the football pitch.
The project also benefited from the technical assistance of architect Carmen Calatayud, professor of architecture at the Universidade de A Coruña José Manuel Vázquez Mosquera, and the archaeology team Arbore, as well as production by the company ARCE for the garden. The project also received favourable reports from several governmental bodies and approval from the full council for the transfer of the work and its subsequent maintenance.
Finally, the project — which is nothing more than a citizens’ contribution to the care of a park — has secured the support of the Deputación de A Coruña and the Xunta de Galicia, joining the support of the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council and the Fondation Daniel et Nina Carasso, the project’s main funder, with a total cost of over 70,000 euros. Once again, our thanks to all the people who made it possible to fulfil the dream we had in 2019. Lastly, we echo the words of Ángel Arcay, resident and commissioner, who in 2021 hoped that the final work would “recall how the whole process was lived collectively, but above all manage to bring people who, even if they did not participate in the entire process, down to the Pasatempo so they know that this work is a community effort and that it forms part of the park.” We hope that is indeed the case.
(1) Jackson, S. J. 2014. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality and Society, eds. P. Tarleton Gillespie. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press. P. 222. (2) https://www.e-flux.com/journal/146/613173/the-unauthorized-repair-of-the-world/
With the collaboration of: Asoc. Amigas do Parque do Pasatempo, Asoc. Roxín Roxal, Asoc. Amigos do Casco Histórico de Betanzos, Asoc. Gabinete de Imaxinación and the Concello de Betanzos.
