Edgar Pedroza
En el canal sur de la carretera m50 - Film - 2009
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 11
Film
The attempt is to produce a short documentary on a place i have never seen. i have my ideas formed from reports and videos i have read on the internet. the site looks promising as a subject. the location is a neighborhood south of Madrid that exists as one unbroken street running ten kilometers in length. the neighborhood has been titled a slum for its distance from the city center and its negative demographics. the neighborhood is in the current development of multiple condominium buildings. Some buildings stand next to empty empty lots and the sun strikes harder than in central Madrid. to reach the most northern section of the neighborhood by foot, you must walk across private developments, across a high speed road by foot, and over a hill of starving seeds. The neighborhood appears in a trough between two large hills, effectively concealing it from most directions. the satellite imagery is greatly deceptive, not only for its incapability to demonstrate the present tense, but for its failure in depicting elevation. the descent to the road is steep and the detail of every step is unforgiving. Construction occurs on the distant hills, as tractors and bulldozers carve the mountainside. the depiction of valdecarros is also greatly flawed, as construction has greatly progressed from the current satellite imagery. From these images, it is easy to imagine the last metro stop to be a mire, it is the opposite. the same is true for the single road below the M50 autoroute, it might be more connected than shown, it is not. to produce a documentary on a place i have seen from a city in which i am living is a far different proposition from one held several months before. it becomes impossible only to represent images from the neighborhood itself, they would be removed from context. the idea of producing an in depth work also fades into memory, as the work becomes focused on the geographic context of the site. What it is, where it is, what is next to it. this is enough, unfortunately, to understand.
