This project began with the story of a swimming pool called “La Isla” (The Island), designed by Luis Gutiérrez Soto in 1930 as a transatlantic ocean liner anchored in the middle of the River Manzanares, inviting Madrid to dive into the social hygiene trends of the day. In the process of exploring that structure’s history, the project grew and incorporated other aspects related to the river that invite us to take another look at its course and discover the relationship between the city’s waters and its inhabitants in the early days of aquatic recreation, long before the advent of low-cost airlines. The pieces I created from this research offer different perspectives in time that redirect or divert the channel of the River Manzanares into the present memory of its fellow citizens. This exercise was performed in a city that was named after its waters but ended up forgetting them, burying its streams and turning its back on its own river.

In Goya’s paintings of traditional fêtes and dances “by the banks of the Manzanares”, we can see that the river was once a place of gathering, leisure and also work. But due to the rampant urban sprawl of the 1950s, it was increasingly hemmed in, polluted and finally occluded by the M-30 ring road. Cars severed the connection between neighbourhoods, while a system of dams disrupted the once-steady flow of water between the nature areas north and south of the city. In recent decades, first with the Madrid Río project and later with the removal of the sluice gates that were damming up its course, we have rediscovered the river. The islands drawn on old city maps have reappeared, and consequently more than 90 species of birds, tortoises, barbels and even otters now enjoy the river as the people of Madrid used to do.

With the advent of beach tourism, people’s attention shifted to the coast while rivers like the Manzanares and its tributary streams filled up with waste, cement and rubble, forgetting that this fresh water was what attracted the first human settlers. Recalling those early twentieth-century bathing facilities on the river turns our gaze back to its waters, waters that tell the history of the city itself—not an epic saga but a quiet story, closer to the mud and silt of that brook, “short and slender as a stiletto, but one of those magnificent specimens of the cutler’s art” (Madrid, Ramón Gómez de la Serna). 

The pieces that comprise this project represent a variety of media, from sculpture to work on paper and video, and were created thanks to the 2020 Visual Arts Grants of the Regional Government of Madrid and the 2019 Artistic Production Residencies of Matadero Madrid.

The photographs were taken by Roberto Ruiz during the exhibition Las Playas de Madrid at Galería Juan Silió (November 2022 – January 2023).