WHAT IS IT?
Invitation to walk the path of the blue waters
When the construction of the Juragua Electronuclear Power Plant was paralyzed in 1992, the surrounding ecosystem began to grow and regenerate.
The vegetation gained ground, the groundwater (abundant in the region) covered the artificial spaces built, among them, the “cooling pools”. The surrounding lands were taken by farmers, who also carried their animals there (cows, pigs, rams), and today they are even the areas where people who migrate from the eastern part of the country live (not always legally) in search of better economic opportunities. During these last three decades, a whole marine and terrestrial ecosystem (of human, animal, plant life) has populated the place and settled in it, covering the ruin that the great industrial structure was becoming. Today it is an environment that extends solidly around that construction...
The path of the blue waters is a project of artistic, community and environmental creation that proposes to get closer to this place. It is an invitation to trace together a path of (re) knowledge and (re) reading of it. To think about his past, about the utopia that generated it, about its relations with its present and, above all, with its future and ours. As a way of positioning ourselves before the reality that contains us today as responsible citizens, not only for the progress of an urban space and its inhabitants, but also for the sustainability of relations with its environment: a reality that we all inhabit and that could be at hand. about to change, as has already happened in the past.
The intention is to open windows of links between a group of people and their natural environment, windows that already exist reflected in academic research and specialists in scientific branches, but that need to be strengthened and enriched with the active participation of citizens, taking into account their micro-economies, their habits, their own dynamics, their age, group and cultural characteristics, their professional and individual interests. This is a project that puts on the table the urgency of connecting community, art and sustainable development of a sensitive site, made vulnerable in the past by the construction of the Work of the Century, today turned into a wild, dense and diverse natural environment and, in a state of ecological-environmental alert if in the future, for any reason, the facilities of the Nuclear Plant are reactivated.
Thus, The path of the blue waters is an invitation to discover and trace the paths that lead us to the lands and waters. To take as a starting point the past and present in this place and place them in the field of "what is possible", where we can be owners and active participants in the future. It is a provocation to build together a message as an ALBUM / GUIDE / MESSAGE (intimate, family, group) that will contain photos, sounds, objects, images, sensations, memories, various materials ... Our desire is to propose a personal and collective reflection, even making use of the imagination, on that natural space that surrounds us, turning it into a concrete fact through all the relationships that we can make from the sensible, from the close and intimate.
We want to carry out this project together, making use of the ties that unite us. We want to have all the voices and all the bodies, even the youngest, even the children. We want to ask and listen to the people who share this little universe. This sample of humanity that we compose as a group. We want to create alliances with the territory that allow us to share common stories with other people, other cities, other ecosystems, other trails, other blue lakes born after the collapse of a utopia: a nuclear utopia or any other disproportionate action. We want to live a time and a space leaving aside even words. It is urgent to learn to communicate in other ways. We want to reveal something on this path, not a great truth, but a wish.
Welcome to walk the path of the blue waters together.
What was CEN and Nuclear City?
The Electronuclear Power Plant of Juragua (CEN) was the most important industrial work of the Cuban Revolution. Its construction began in 1982 with funding and supervision from the USSR. Parallel to it, the Nuclear City, a community for its workers, is planned. After the fall of the socialist camp the central is paralyzed. One of the reactors was 75% built and the other 25%. The cost of lives and resources was vast. This situation, as well as the arrival of the Special Period: the greatest economic crisis that Cuba has experienced, caused a large number of people to have to restart their life projects and find new ways of subsisting.
The Nuclear City was also half built (residential buildings, as well as the entire cultural infrastructure: cinemas, theaters, art centers, etc.). Over the years, a veil of silence and concealment fell over both projects. They were the image of the failure of economic and political utopias. Even today talking about the subject is taboo in certain circles. Currently this place and its inhabitants live isolated, marginalized... This disconnection also leads them to ignore much of what is happening around them, to live in a fragility, even cultural, of knowledge.
Our project, in the first place, wants to draw a bridge between the present of that industrial ruin (in the process of becoming a hazardous waste dumpster) and people. Let them know not only the fact and the impact of the new habilitation of the former nuclear power plant, but also how it is possible to face life from a sustainable perspective and care for the environment.At the same time, carry out a creative process that crosses this awareness with an exercise in resilience done with the inhabitants themselves: where they are heard, they have a voice to speak about their present lives, their frustrations and desires. The final intention is to rethink, from the link with the environment, the memory of the place to reformulate it, remove it from the past and abandonment and offer tools for the future.
Environmental issue
In December 2015, the Cuban government announced through the Cubadebate press the construction of a national hazardous waste dumpster at the facilities of the Juragua electronuclear power plant (CEN), located in the province of Cienfuegos. The news also appeared in the "National Environmental Strategy 2016-2020" of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment.
The risk of affecting ecosystems (both marine, river and terrestrial) is unpredictable in the face of a possible rehabilitation of the Plant. The land must be removed, and with it the entire vegetation where a large number of animals (reptiles, birds, amphibians, domestic mammals / bovines) and flora live. The waters formed as "artificial pools" would be banned, before any risk of spillage or release of toxic waste. Animal and human life would be notably affected, reduced and displaced to more urban spaces, concentrated in a community that would further enhance fragility in the presence of the waste dumpster
We are interested in addressing the consequences that this possible reactivation of the CEN would have for the entire environment, wildlife and human life, as well as for the aquifer and the surrounding areas from a relationship of curiosity and environmental care. From the construction of this collective conscience, where scientists, engineers and the creative group will intervene together with members of the community of various origins and ages, the artistic devices will be created for the final intervention. In the same way, the process will be strongly focused on collectively finding sustainable tools and recycling resources that allow the inhabitants to preserve the biota and not over-exploit it.
We want to highlight the value of the life of the inhabitants of the area (human, animal, plant) in relation to the CEN and its history, with the memory of the place and the physical geography of the site (the aquifer, and therefore, the lands that have been gradually inhabited and sown). The purpose is to create various artistic or site-specific interventions in the most sensitive and fragile areas that would be removed, depopulated and transformed (for example: the brackish water “pools”, the blue lakes and the extensions of land that surround the Juragua region).
The artistic device will cross the individual biographies of ordinary people who still live there, with the history and architecture of the nuclear reactor, projecting, in the urban intervention format (exhibition, concert, performance, video), an environmentally responsible look. . All this from an inclusive artistic practice, which gives voice and participation to the protagonists of this story of a broken utopia, including members of the community also weakened by this cause.
We are especially interested in working with the elements water and earth, which would be the first to be removed and transformed. They are also fundamental elements for human life, and in turn allow them to be "intervened" from a creative practice that works with them as symbols of the power and fragility of nature.
People involved
The path of the blue waters involves people of various origins and ages, because awareness of environmental care and sustainability is an urgent issue that concerns everyone. However, the work focuses on three fundamental groups: children / adolescents / youth, senior citizens (including those destined to work at the Nuclear Power Plant) and people who have suffered marginalization in the area (members of the LGBTIQ + community) .
The complex circumstances that the inhabitants of the region have gone through have favored double marginalization: external and internal. This has had strong consequences at the sociological level: the increase in gender violence, machismo and homophobia. For this reason we have a marked interest, for the collective creation of artistic intervention devices, in including people from this segregated group within the communal space itself: homosexuals, transsexuals, transvestites.
For the project it is essential to create a parallel consciousness: ecological and sociological. Open our eyes to environmental care while generating a group capable of working from difference, empowering itself from diversity and strengthening itself as a community. Being autonomous and responsible also implies the inclusion of all the members of a certain human group. Children, adolescents and young people: because they are still of formative age; people of the second age: because they have a deep-rooted sense of belonging to the place, because they have lost faith and this exercise of resilience helps them to reformulate their own history for the future; LGBTIQ + community: because its inclusion makes the social group stronger, more diverse, more open to collective solutions to the environmental challenge faced by this population.
Gender and inclusivity
The project starts from some demographic characteristics of the community, a place where, somehow, time stopped, also in cultural and social terms. Where machismo and homophobia have been reinforced, and where it is necessary to open our eyes towards a more inclusive social practice and acceptance of the other. Young people migrate there, the older ones remain, but they also receive a wave of people who come from the fields, from the eastern part of the country.
Today there are also people without work, with few studies carried out, many of them men forged in hard work (for example, the so-called “flintstones”: who are dedicated to breaking rocks and extracting metal fragments from the rubble of a nuclear plant, and then sell them on the black market). This type of population often tends to homophobia, transphobia, traditional codes of violence and machismo.
For this reason, carry out a project like this, which involves the WHOLE community, which brings together bodies and minds in order to face the care of the environment as a verifiable problem (whose consequences would be experienced collectively and independently of the inclination or identity sexual), has to go through the social conflicts that divide this human group, and open (from knowledge practices, preservation of the environment, and artistic practices) a sensitive look at both the problem of the natural ecosystem and the social ecosystem.
Including people from different groups within this micro-society in all stages of the project generates, in the first place, an important presence of them, gives them a voice in balance with others, and opens a dialogue at the social level that is now hermetic. In addition, it is a way of making them present and of reformulating the memory of the place, of projecting it into the future not only as a more cultured and informed space about its own environmental problems, but as a society that is more strengthened on a human level.
Impacts
To care it is necessary to know. To generate impact, it is necessary to draw up strategies from the knowledge of what the environment gives, and of its own potentialities. The path of the blue waters wants to make the environment of the Nuclear City known to its inhabitants. This link with nature (the waters, the lands, the fauna) must be founded and strengthened on solid scientific bases, but above all with knowledge.
One of the fundamental premises is to make known ways previously implemented in other places from which a community has learned to use and sustainably care for its natural environment. What do we have, what resources do we have? How is it possible to recycle in the absence of resources to establish a healthy and growing relationship with the natural environment? These questions will try to be answered in interdisciplinary groups, to lay the foundations of a knowledge, a broader environmental culture, a projection to the future.
From here, as well as from creative work with artistic tools and devices, the community becomes stronger, finds a point of unity, and knows itself more and better. They listen to each other, they provide their own voice. Thus, the IMPACT that we would be interested in generating is that of having mobilized ideas and generated discussion, opinion and belonging in the community, and that this works to activate in the future other ways of sharing and creating collectivity, of joining as a group and dealing with conflicts that ensue.
Obviously, we hope that learning about environmental awareness, knowledge of the environment and its characteristics, care, and the AUTONOMOUS and COLLECTIVE creation of our own tools in ecological terms, remain and be preserved to understand how to create positive and sustainable solution dynamics from a healthy relationship with the environment.
Finally, we hope that the exercise of resilience that the creative process proposes will serve to make people think more about the space where these people live, to get to know it better, to reformulate their place in it and the historical and detained memory of the site. That the artistic act works as a trigger to activate the present, and place the past in another place from then on. We want the project to open a door to acceptance, to a better understanding of these issues, to discussion and, gradually, to an eventual and true awareness, solution and, above all, autonomy and freedom.
The path of the blue waters has been selected for support through the 2020 Open Call: Cultural & Artistic Responses to Environmental Change organized by the Prince Claus Foundation in collaboration with the Goethe Institute.
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