Once upon a time there was a future…

Once upon a time there was a future… Once upon a time there was an island ruled by the checkers rules, which had a limited portion of land where it was foretold a game would take place, for which a battlefield would be required, where savage and natural land would be submitted under the whimsical scope of humans. The commencement of the game is announced, the very first thrust is the grid that provides the places and the spaces; it imposes and restricts the movements. The board divides, virgin, unoccupied, to leave way for a game of hypotheses and strategies. It constructs inexistent buildings, gives life to its imaginary inhabitants, and frames predictable activities: with its indifference towards topography, to what already exists and vindicates the superiority of mental building over reality. The norms are established; those that only make sense in a world invented my man in its entirety, that is to say, inside the fantasy of a game, in which the pieces can’t take a step back. This is how the colonization of a new territory begins where speculation becomes more and more material, those inhabitants, buildings and activities once projected, now take life, moving through the apparently neutral and disciplined trace that somehow creates disorder in the only axis it doesn’t dominate: the vertical. This new factor is introduced into the game, the last factor that will give place to complete subjugation of the territory, establishing a new order.

Once the board is completely taken, ambition takes over its players, if the trace dominates the territory as well. How can we keep growing? If the first ambition led to extending the limits of Manhattan as far away from the natural as humanly possible, the human capacity had its limits, but now, which are the limits of that human capacity? We could imagine the lines on the board extending farther than their own limits, overflowing and projecting themselves over the table in search of new territory. The rules were established centuries ago, there were, are, and will be the base of expansion, the presence of nostalgia of the past as a projection of the future, a witness of the fact that history repeats itself.

These rules set the foundation for the “new past”, who’s peasants in a checkers board, the tons of garbage and sediment make the first line of battle colonizing the river. This subtle movement is more of an outline of the plays to come, what can be seen through the human eye becomes technologically possible. Now we could conquer the river with no need to obstruct it, to keep the existent overlapping the expansion with more reliable lays and relationships that follow the rules. Every step of conquest is filled with that agonizing, nostalgic desire of backing down and learning of the source of certainty of the past, incorporating a source of technology which is the present.

The game extends every time there is a new space to conquer. Now the city rests over the river, the board seems to accept its extension nicely over the table making the river an underground cause that feeds the new parks that the city called for screaming: ecological connections that still preserve the bridges like ancient scars that once connected two different and distant moves, now united in the limit of their possibilities, through the checkmate; that final move.