Traveling Office. Paraná Delta Network. Ala Plástica

15.12.15

Assembly of producers at the Isla Esperanza Cooperative

We are opening a consultation/exhibition space on the project Traveling Office. Paraná Delta Network  from the Argentinian collective
Ala Plástica
next Thursday, December 17 at 7:00 p.m. in the
physical space of LaFundició
.

This is the first in a series of spaces for disseminating work developed by various agents—in this case, a collective of artists in collaboration with the inhabitants of the Paraná Delta (province of Buenos Aires, Argentina), social organizations, scientists, and public workers—. These are processes and contexts that we can somehow link to the context close to the physical space of LaFundició and to processes that occur in this territory; thus, the exhibitions aim to contribute to debates and the collective construction of knowledge by situating them in their environment.

On this occasion, the strategies promoted by the Ala Plástica collective in collaboration with an entire network of diverse agents in defense of the ecosystems and inhabitants of the Paraná Delta, can encourage debate around the relationship between Barcelona and its metropolitan area with the Llobregat ecosystem and on collective strategies for its defense.

The mouth of the Llobregat is crossed by numerous infrastructures that supply services to the city of Barcelona, built on one of the most fertile agricultural soils in Catalonia and a strategic point on the route of birds through the western Mediterranean. The Baix Llobregat is a territory constantly subjected to real estate and speculative pressure on land that produces 15% of the food consumed in the city of Barcelona: reclassifications, territorial modifications, and constant development plans such as the outlet of Viladecans, the AENA golf course, Eurovegas, or the
PDU Gran Via-Llobregat
that threatens the last agricultural area of L’Hospitalet known as Cal Trabal.

Who designs the territories? Who are they designing them for? Real Estate Advance – The Colony Park Case 

The development of real estate plans and the accelerated and voracious rhythms of politics, on many occasions, end up overwhelming culture and regional roots in order to establish certain projects towards which the population must be directed without consultation.

In the island area in the 1st Section of the Lower Delta Argentino, district of Tigre, Province of Buenos Aires, there were several families dedicated to extractive activities, such as the collection of reeds and formio, fishing and hunting; and productive activities, such as willow and poplar forestry and wicker cultivation, in small portions of their properties (farms), along with the raising of farm animals for domestic consumption just one thousand meters from the most exclusive nautical neighborhoods in the Northern area of Greater Buenos Aires. Unlike the usual land ownership regime, the residents did not possess the titles to the lands in which they have lived and worked for years.

In mid-2008, the construction company Colony Park S.A. began its infrastructure works on these islands (on a farm of around 300 hectares), in order to condition the land for the subsequent location of a mega-real estate development of a gated community intended for sectors with high purchasing power. It was a project presented by the company as «the first permanent housing development on a true island in the Argentine Delta».

The works consisted of raising the land, diverting, dredging, and widening the original course of streams, producing modifications in wetland ecosystems with their consequent impacts on biodiversity and the expulsion of the island families, settled there for several decades, invading their properties and demolishing their homes and other facilities, and disrupting, in addition to the landscape, the availability of resources on which their family economy was based.

None of the people dispossessed of their homes had a title deed at that time; however, they were possessors under Argentine law because they carried out the possession of the place for more than 20 years in a public, peaceful, and uninterrupted manner.

Not so Colony Park, which paid $25,000 for 360 hectares of the island to the company Better S.A. in September 1999. Quickly, the values of each lot in the private neighborhood, of half a hectare, was offered by the company at $200,000.

In the course of these events, the families criminally denounced the usurpation of fiscal lands and waters, collective environmental damage, and crimes against humanity to the courts and managed to remain in a small portion of their original properties. However, considering that these actions were not sufficient, and that continuing with their island work is what would enable them to remain on the islands, they carried out a process of forming a cooperative of reed workers which they called Isla Esperanza and installed a workshop for the manufacture of articles with reeds and other materials (curtains, basketry, etc.). Resisting with a form of work typical of the place.

The situation that was presented could be described as follows:

• Companies and the State produce habitats that satisfy the residential consumption needs of “environmental quality” for sectors with high purchasing power.
  Companies obtain enormous profits by appropriating areas that until that moment had low market value.
• The island residents pay the costs: companies and the State use various coercive means to expel them in order to privatize the floodable lands and convert them into merchandise.
• With privatization, they appropriate the land, water, and natural resources, which constitute the place of residence and the means of production and work of the island residents.
• By being forced to abandon their ways of life linked to the river and the islands, they are pushed to live in the impoverished peripheries of the large cities in an environment that they have not chosen, and to subsist with jobs that have nothing to do with their forms of rural/fluvial work.
• The spatial result of these practices is the fragmentation of the territories, and the exclusion of important sectors of the population, thus generating spaces included in the integration processes and excluded spaces, which will end up generating more social and environmental inequality.

On August 29, 2009, the court issued a precautionary measure ordering the works to be paralyzed until the project had the environmental suitability certificate that the Provincial Organization for Sustainable Development of the Province of Buenos Aires (OPDS) should issue, granting it or denying it. That ruling was ratified by the Justice two months later. However, the works continued, and so did the problems.

The Traveling Office is installed in that situation and develops, together with other producers of culture and cultivation, different activation strategies, organizing territorial planning meetings from the base, celebrating cultural events, assemblies, media campaigns, and advice to try to find the best way to address the conflict, promoting the emergence of new symbolic, environmental, and organizational practices.

In this framework, the Provincial Organization for Sustainable Development convenes a public hearing to debate the issue and decide on the situation. Islanders, prominent scientists, social organizations, and officials unanimously expressed their rejection and repudiation of the Colony Park mega-real estate development.

Finally, the Organization denied the Environmental Impact Statement requested by the firm Colony Park S.A. and ordered the firm to present a plan of actions to be executed aimed at the restoration of the environment and natural resources of the property affected by the project, which is currently closed.