Paper short abstract:

A stone wall on a mountainside collapses. Decay suspended. What does it mean to seek its repair?

Paper long abstract:

The following paper is based on fieldwork in 2021 in a mountainous area of southern Spain, the Alpujarras, largely abandoned during a rural exodus expedited by the construction of industrial greenhouses on the coast. The collapse of once cultivated terraces is not only caused by leaving them in a state of disrepair, but by changes in the flow of water which exert effects along its entire trajectory. Water which once flowed in a system of fertile acequías (water channels) meandering across the mountain, having now been largely redirected to new sites of value on the coast, traces the region’s decline. Decay is not singular. But by pronouncing a ‘knotted’ world (Ingold 2015) as lifeless, dead, and thereby timeless, capitalism has been allowed to thrive. Leaving a wall to rupture, much like tubing up an acequia, is to overturn a certain body of time, to choose for another rhythm, to let water slip across its surface without sinking in. This paper follows a path undertaken by foot, ‘reiterating’ (Solnit 2000) the movements once taken from the village to the forest on its periphery, and in doing so, uncovers the inhabitants’ relations to waste, time, memory, questioning how the desire to salvage, both plays into and clashes against engrained logics of modernity.