Aumentar el caudal de un río

An intervention which tries to minimally offset, from the furtive and the precarious, the incidence that major infrastructure has on the state of a territory.
 

The project consisted of creating a new channel to divert water from the Seròs canal, built a century ago to feed a hydroelectric power station, and return it to the Segre river, whose reduced flow as it passes through the city of Lleida is below the minimum that environmental standards set.

While the canal takes water from the river and returns it to the Segre 25 km further on, this intervention worked as a shortcut to return some of the water diverted into the river.

Although its impact on flow volumes was not visible, it worked on a small scale trying to offset (about 40 l/h) the current distribution: 60,000 l/s for the canal and 2,000 l/s for the river. The rechannelling, effected with hidden hoses, worked thanks to the siphon effect. The set-up remained in place for seven months before it disappeared.

Aumentar el caudal de un río was produced in 2014 for Campo Adentro (Centre d’Art la Panera) and is part of the MACBA collection.

Luz Broto is an artist and lecturer at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Barcelona. She works with space, with what is here, taking into account the architecture of the place, its urban environment or position within a territory, its infrastructure or organisational structure, its regulations, uses and protocols; and proposes minimal operations which change everything. She has carried out site-specific intervention projects in collaboration with different institutions and in various contexts, such as Asimilar la temperatura exterior (Secession, Vienna, 2011), Aumentar el caudal de un río (Centro de Arte la Panera, Lleida, 2014), Abrir un agujero permanente (MACBA, Barcelona, 2015), Derogar las normas de uso relativas al silencio (Koldo Mitxelena Kulturunea, San Sebastian, 2016), Tensar una línea entre dos interiores paralelos (FLORA, Bogotá, 2018) or recently Prolongar los pilares (ethall, L’Hospitalet, 2021). She has received production grants such as Blueproject Foundation, BCN Producción or currently the Botín Foundation’s Visual Arts Grant. luzbroto.net