When the construction of the Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant was halted, the surrounding ecosystem began to grow and regenerate. Flora gained ground, and abundant groundwater covered the artificial spaces. The surrounding lands were cultivated by farmers, who also brought their animals (cows, pigs, goats). Today, these lands have become areas where people who migrate from the eastern part of the country in search of better economic opportunities live, often illegally.
Over the past three decades, a complete marine and terrestrial ecosystem (of human, animal, and plant life) has taken root in the area, covering the ruins of the large industrial structure. Today, this environment solidly extends around the remains of that construction…
They say that another settlement has sprung up around the Nuclear City. They say there are roads to reach it, although most of them are lost in the undergrowth. The maps don’t show them. The maps we know do not know how to see. A place with its own rules and ways of coexisting with other surrounding areas, other ecosystems, and other natural instances where birds, insects, and reptiles also abound… And the fact is that there, when humanity stopped doing its thing, life began again.
They say that cattle graze there, that farmers sow in secret to trade and eat. They say that there are brackish and fresh waters running freely, making children, old people, and fish happy. They say that the neighbors use the old industrial facilities as places for recreation. They say that they often live on the margins, even outside of the law. They say that this place has no name because the words as we know them are part of an officialdom that the place does not share. We need to exercise and/or reformulate other ways to approach these words, to know and interpret them.
They say that this astonishing, unheard-of landscape emerged after the fracture of a great project, something unfinished even today. An atomic and incomprehensible dream. A dream that escaped from our hands.
«The Path of the Blue Waters: An Artistic, Community, and Environmental Creation Project» proposes an approach to this place. It aims to trace a path of (re)knowledge and (re)reading of it. The project encourages us to contemplate its past, the utopia that gave rise to it, and its relationship with the present and future, which also belongs to us. It urges us to position ourselves as responsible citizens, not only concerned with the progress of an urban space and its inhabitants, but also committed to the sustainability of the relationship with its environment – a reality that we all inhabit and that may be on the brink of change, just as it has occurred in the past.
The intention is to «open windows of links» between a group of people and their natural environment. Windows that have already been addressed in academic research and scientific specialists. However, they need to be enhanced 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 site made vulnerable in the past due to the construction of the Work of the Century. And that today has become a wild, diverse natural environment, in a state of ecological-environmental alert if in the future, for some reason, the facilities of the power plant were to be reactivated.
We would like to discover and trace the paths that lead us to the lands and waters.
We would like to carry out this project together, making use of the ties that unite us, from the most obvious ones, to those that we can build in the coming months.
We want to work with all voices and all bodies, even the youngest, even the children.
We would like to ask and listen to the people who share this small universe. This sample of humanity that we compose as a group.
We would like to create alliances with the territory. Alliances that allow us to share common stories with other people, other cities, other ecosystems, other paths, other blue lakes born after the collapse of a utopia.
We would like to live a time and a space leaving aside even words.
It is urgent to learn to communicate in other ways.
We would like to reveal something on this path, not a great truth, but a desire.
Welcome everyone to walk together the path of the blue waters.