pictures & plans

fin de temporada

the end of season

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin. On the concept of history.

The end of season - started in Spanish as Fin de Temporada - is a transmedia project, which takes the form of a video-essay and publication comprising a graphic, photographic and research analysis. The project is also a review of the effects of the current economic model on water resources and leisure, through the ruins of more than 100 abandoned water parks in the South of Europe. The first part of the project, which includes Spain and Portugal, is done, while the second part, which covers Italy and Greece, is now under development.

Significantly, the published part of the project was selected earlier this year as a finalist at the 2024 FAD Awards – in the critic & theoretical section - as well as at the 2024 ARQUIA PROXIMA Awards. The video-essay has also been shortlisted at several cultural & cinema festivals like the 9th Ibiza Cinefest International Independent Film Festival, the 26th MECAL Barcelona International Short and Animation Film Festival, the 9th Torrevieja National Film Festival, the Net/Rrjet Exhibition at the Center for Narrative Practice at Pristina, and at the Water for the Environment Conference at the Cultural Centre of Spain in Mexico DF, among others.

The project began with two almost simultaneous findings:

First, an informal & unexpectedly long list of abandoned water parks in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. In the Iberian Peninsula alone, there are 41. Secondly, over the past five years, a series of news publications with studies by the United Nations and the World Resources Institute, which warned of the adverse future that awaited the south of Europe, with a water scarcity of five times the European average, a risk of extreme water poverty and a million hectares in severe danger of desertification.

Both realities gave rise to a series of questions about why water parks were being built and abandoned in places without excess water and why their ruins generated so much fascination.

The End of Season has been constituted as a project halfway between documentary research and an artistic piece. With the support of the Injuve Grants - financed by the Spanish Ministry of Social Affairs & Agenda 2030 - Leonor Martín and Aida Navarro undertook a physical journey filming this list of locations of abandoned parks in the Iberian Peninsula, and on another discursive journey, interviewing key people in this story who shed light on a situation that, as they soon witnessed, saw that it was multifaceted. Many of the issues that are in the news today intersected transversally: the use of water, but also the landscape and the protection of ecosystems; social relations in leisure, collective and individual spaces; the limits of the economic model; the subject of progress; and the dystopian image of an uncertain future in the midst of two crises: the ecological and the economic.

END OF SEASON
Part I - Spain & portugal

Book
Video-essay

AUTHORS
Aida Navarro Redón
Leonor Martín Taibo

END OF SEASON IN MEDIA
El Pais - Verne
El Español
ABC
Levante EMV
Diario Vasco
Yorokobu
RTVE
RNE
Radio 3
Canal Extremadura
RAC 1
Ondacero

fin de temporada End of Season

fin de temporada
End of Season