DocTalks x MoMA Session 7 - "Miracles in Europe’s Orchard" and "Origin and Evolution of Lisbon’s Riverfront"

Website: https://doctalks.net

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Presenter: DÁMASO RANDULFE, Royal College of Art

Respondent: Dr. Manuel Saga Sánchez García (ETSAM - UPM)

Exactly thirteen years after the Spanish Catholic Monarchs conquered the city of Al-Mariyyāt, a swirl of otherworldly lights appeared off its shores at the break of dawn. A premonition struck the coastal guards. Drawn towards the light, they were met by the divine figure of the Virgin Mary. From that moment, the city’s inhabitants have sought the protection of the Most Holy Virgin of the Sea against plagues, earthquakes, droughts, and other disasters afflicting this area of the Mediterranean.

This presentation travels between the Marian apparition of 1502 and the so-called ‘plastic miracle’ that took place in 20th-century Almería, when a vast geo-engineering experiment following Francoist internal colonisation plans transformed Europe’s only desert into its leading exporter of vegetables. Fuelled by the intensive exploitation of natural resources and precarised migrant labour, Almería’s operational landscapes are a well-established case study of the excesses of supply chain capitalism and its global infrastructures. Analyses of this agripole depict it either in a perpetually present tense as a blooming desert devoid of history, or as the culmination of a historical sequence of extractive cycles and territorial transformations. However, the region’s pasts—spanning land inscriptions and extractions, internal and international colonial enterprises, fascist massacres and radioactive pollution—also infiltrate this global agro-industrial enclave in eerily convoluted ways. Occurring across vastly different temporalities and degrees of visibility, these intrusions elude customary narrative and imaging strategies. To spell these spectral contaminations, this presentation charts not a sequence of events but a field of resonances, moving backwards and forwards while tracing two attendant trajectories: a surface-led inquiry of Almería’s fields as distributed sentient assemblages, and a depthward exploration of the subterranean consistencies haunting these landscapes today.

Presenter: JOÃO CRUZ, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Urbanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa,

ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

Respondent: Dr. Braden Scott, Incoming Assistant Professor of Early Modern Art & Architecture, University of Manitoba’s School of Art

In Lisbon, over the centuries, man has conquered the waters of the Tagus. Today, after the various landfills, the riverfront of the city is a consolidated strip of land, topped by walls that, against the “undulation” of the Tagus, define an expanded area that welcomes an intense port activity.

It was in this strip by the river that an important part of Lisbon's history took place, since the Roman and Muslim occupations, and also particularly during the period of the Discoveries, the post-earthquake Pombaline reconstruction and the industrial boom of the 19th century. Some of these historical moments are reflected in the numerous plans, charts and maps available in this study, from the Plan of the City of Lisbon: 1650, by João Nunes Tinoco, to the Port of Lisbon Improvement Plan, from 1946. In these plans, but also in handwritten letters, period reports, engravings and old photographs - largely unpublished documents -, which this research work proposes to map this territory, making original drawings that allow a new look at its growth processes and consolidation.

Thus, this study reconciles all these elements, constituting a complete analysis that focuses on the evolution of Lisbon's riverfront and that allows discovering numerous aspects until here unknown, helping to answer the question that arises today: in the face of the scenario that the current port is going through, how can Lisbon recover its ancient relationship with the river?