The Limits of Control

Sempere is a village shaped by the control of water. The Bellús reservoir transformed the territory and introduced a second geography: areas that may one day be flooded.

At the edge of the village I found an abandoned threshing floor where construction materials were partly buried by vegetation. The intervention consisted of clearing, measuring, classifying and rearranging everything already there.

Thousands of roof tiles became a cube of about 160 cm per side; more than fifty large stone blocks were excavated and ordered; broken tile fragments filled two metal cylinders already on site.

In the end, the materials are essentially the same. They have simply been enumerated, measured, reordered and controlled. But for how long?

Before the intervention, the materials had been scattered for years, partially buried and absorbed by vegetation. These images document the site before clearing, measuring, counting and rearranging what was already there.

For a full week, Oriol Pinell and I, with the support of a construction team and a crane to move the heaviest pieces, reorganised all the rubble that had been illegally dumped on the site. Tiles, stones, concrete fragments and other remains shifted from a dispersed accumulation into an ordered structure, without adding or removing any material from the site.