Paper short abstract:

Coastal authorities build boundary marks to delimit the abstract line of the coast in order to regulate it. I have been walking and collecting synthetic and natural fibers along this coast to literaly weave a thread that challenges that representation with a concrete material line that can be felt.

Paper long abstract:

This research through making tries to challenge the way we undertsand and represent the 'Costa Blanca', in Southern Mediterranean Spain, a territory that has undergone major urbanization for tourism in the space of just sixty years. Planning authorities at national and regional levels try to control the forces of urbanization through the delimitation of the line of the coast. In the map, they draw an abstract line and, in the site, they build reinforced concrete boundary marks every few tens of meters. Together, these devices are meant to fix that rich shifting boundary where water, land and air meet. Thus, beachgoers, environmentalists, housing developers and leisure businesses negotiate this strip of line through the tools of surveying and counting. Placed in the hyphen between anthropology and architecture, as an endeavour in research-creation, I am searching for alternative ways to understand this space. I find a useful tool in the techniques of weaving, where counting is also important but becomes a sort of narrative device. I have been walking along many of the four hundred kilometres of this coast gathering synthetic and natural fibers with which I am weaving a thread. Kots give a reference of a lived scale and labels orientate the 'walker' with natural and built landmarks. When passing your fingers along this thread the line is felt through its materials. This way, enjoyment, that has transformed this boundary between earth and sea, is understood as an active experience and not only as a consumer good.