The path of the blue waters

Nuclear City, Cienfuegos, Cuba.
January – July, 2022
Collective The Trailer

When the construction of the Juraguá Nuclear Power Plant (Cienfuegos, Cuba) was paralyzed in 1992, the surrounding ecosystem began to grow and regenerate.

 The vegetation gained ground, the groundwater covered the artificial spaces built. The surrounding lands were taken by farmers, who also carried their animals there (cows, pigs, rams), and today they are even the areas where people who migrate from the eastern part of the country live (not always legally) in search of better economic opportunities. During these last three decades, a whole marine and terrestrial ecosystem (of human, animal, plant life) has populated the place and settled in it, covering the ruin that the great industrial structure was becoming. Today it’s an environment that extends solidly around that construction…

​The path of the blue waters is an artistic, community and environmental project that proposes to approach this place and the Nuclear City. This settlement was built with the intention of being the home of the builders, engineers and other workers of the old plant.

The whole construction was interrupted during the early 90s, and the place became a sort of capsule of time, still and slow. Today it confronts many socio-economic issues, due to its isolation, and environmental ones, due to the possible construction of a hazardous waste dumpster. This information is not very clear to the inhabitants, though. 

This project wants to raise awareness about the ecological damage for the blue lakes around the city, the forest and the soils, and the environmental impact for the community in case the dumpster is finally built.

It’s an invitation to trace together a path of (re) knowledge and (re) reading of the place. To think about its past, about the social utopia that created it, and the current relations of the inhabitants with its present and, above all, with its future and the preservation of the environment.

Project awarded in the Call for Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change 2020. Prince Claus Foundation-Goethe Institut.

CREDITS

Experts of life/ performers
Atilio Caballero
Arianna Cepero
Fabricio Caballero
Natalia Caballero
Jose Gabriel Limonta
Gabriel Alejandro Limonta Diaz
Taimi Blanco
Aleksander Naranjo
Daniel Anton Morera

Facilitators/mediators
Luis Ángel Rodríguez (Biologist/ environmentalist)
Abel Dominguez (Local historian)
Aleksander Naranjo (Electrical Engineer)

Coordination/direction
Alessandra Santiesteban
Karina Pino Gallardo
Atilio Caballero

Documentation
Daniel Antón Morera (Visual artist)
Grethel Malú Román Urquiola (Photographer)

Collaborations
La Fortaleza Theater Group, Nuclear City, Cienfuegos

Funding
Call for Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change, 2020. Prince Claus Foundation-Goethe Institut. 

+info: The path of the blue waters – website