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The first time he went to Hawaii, Joni Mitchell wrote Big Yellow Taxi: “They took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum, And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them”. The conceptual fossilisation and museumification of things from everyday life as a way to distance them from everyday life is the topic of ¿Dónde está mi acequia? It traces the origins of a city, Murcia, by starting with its oldest acequias or irrigation channels of al-andalus origin. The city seems to have a shape that is no longer of use to it, and everything that falls into disuse gets transformed into an archaeological curiosity: acequias, irrigation channels, ways of organising the space around harvests. With its back turned to its agricultural past, the city’s relationship with water becomes absurd. Alongside Conchi Meseguer, a farmer from a long line of farmers, the film traces some of what remains of this culture in oral memory, photographic memory and on the ground itself, where human remains can be found from all sorts of pasts. It studies the shapes of the bones of those who worked the land, the songs that accompanied them, the festivals they celebrated as ways to ensure that those dead can survive through the survival of their ways of life. The film explores the city and surrounding areas while asking questions: Why, when and how did Murcia cease being an agricultural city? When were the language and life surrounding those irrigation channels lost to us? When did that language and irrigation become things of the past? All these questions and ideas appear in scenes of conversation, reunion, assembly and consultation, but they also appear in furious montage sequences that the film transforms into musicals with the musical group Crudo Pimento, which gives another speed to the city and time itself for thinking about that catastrophe of a planned future contrary to the city and its inhabitants. The lyrics by Crudo Pimento —tomorrow is a monster / tomorrow is a vampire— are as Benjaminian as the entire film.
Lucía Salas
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