How can we reactivate the Plaza de la Vaguada within an environment where we can connect in a different way? How can we emphasize the nature of coexistence to generate new fields of complicity and empathy between residents and their surrounding environment? ‘Acciones ExtraOrdinarias’ is a public art project developed in the Parque de La Vaguada since June 2018, within the framework of the ‘Imagina Madrid’ program. In it, the artistic team—composed of Estelle Julian, Paula Valero, and C+Arquitectos, with the collaboration of Leonor Martín—aims to fill the plaza with actions ranging from performance to spatial intervention, articulating new bonds between the district's diverse communities and restoring conviviality, desire, and joy to this previously abandoned space.
The project in question, Los Descensos, emerged in January 2018 through co-design sessions in which residents expressed that water—though absent at the time—is part of the recent memory of the Parque de la Vaguada, and that the empty pond was merely a faithful reflection of its absence. Los Descensos is an interactive infrastructure that adapts an abandoned pond for public use, acting as an environmental mediator: by making its connections to water visible, it links us to the site, its territory, its memory, and its resources.
