Watermarks

Carlos Monleón: So, I don’t know if I should talk straight away about your book Més de dues Aiguës or… but then, it’s not really talking directly about the book at all. It seems to me, from the little or lots, depending on how you look at it, I know of your work, that water is always very present, even if it’s not a theme. In the novel it is perhaps a bit more of a theme because you mention issues about irrigation, aquifers, and wells. But yes, reading between the lines, there are a lot of these constant currents in your work.

Claudia Pagès: Water has followed me in several projects but I don’t think water has ever been a central theme per se. Not even in this book, although it does have certain conflicts that happen around it. Water has appeared in my work as salt water or fresh water, or as a circulating space between the two. In fact, I’ve worked a lot with handmade paper, precisely because paper is that which circulates between them. The salty port water helped me work on the gerundial legal text, the language that calms the seas. In the end, the sea is the colonizing space through which the legal text passes. After the work I did about ports, I started going into paper archives to move to fresh water. In order to make paper you need a lot of fresh water. I am from Capellades, a village on top of an aquifer, and there is water everywhere, and it has always been a central theme in my town, hence the novel, and the works Typo Topo Time Aljibe and Aljubs i Grups. These are two videos recorded in two cisterns, the first one I showed at Sculpture Center, and the second is now at Manifesta. These cisterns are in Xàtiva, which is the first place that made paper in all of Europe, in the 11th century. I then follow the paper route, which is the same as the Silk Route, and that’s where I found the cisterns, water containers. When I enter, however, these cisterns become containers of time. For me, they have been spaces to understand the time of the colonist that is superimposed on the walls. These architectures contain time in a cartographic way, overlapping.

C.M.: Yes, yes, it is in the cisterns that you also find the inscription, they are also spaces of inscription or means of inscription, in the marks that you find on the walls.

C.P.: I left the work of Gerundi because it was a super symbolic text, it was about language and its violence as language. As a very symbolic space, in fact, I went to very large places, like the port of Barcelona or the World Trade Center, Montjuic. To get out of there, I went to do research in paper archives to focus on the water marks, because I wanted to go to the text, to the letter. Thus, instead of staying in language as a structuring thing (as I understood the gerund), I left the Gerundian port water and looked for the letter and what circulates in the waters. I focused on the negative mark, that is, the watermarks, because they are only visible against the light, they have an invisible or negative circulation. And it seemed to me that this did more, because it was not even looking at the text but rather focusing on the mark as a signifier that circulates (chains) the violence of marking. In the novel there is a lot of graffiti. The town wakes up with marks, there is new graffiti every day. Graffiti, posters, monologues by other characters, various languages and marks that the protagonist has to shake off, as if they were shirts that she took off.

“We are a territory of water, we are a territory of invisible things.”

C.M.: While thinking this morning it occurred to me that watermarks could be the title of this conversation, because of the work on paper that you have done where you use marks as a medium, those pieces of paper made by your mother, Victoria. And because of the idea that water can mark something. You talk about water as a means of circulation, but water is not a means, that is, let’s say, innocuous, so water also, as I understand it, belongs to a place, right? And belonging to a place marks people’s lives.

C.P.: I was thinking that all the waters that appear in my work are waters that are constantly trying to be legalized, to be subjected to the law. Maybe that is also a question of belonging. Inside these cisterns in Xàtiva, for example, there were legal contracts. That is what fascinated me and annoyed me: what is this act of entering a cistern to write a legal contract? In the works of Gerundi these salty waters also appeared with the legal language of the port, of maintenance. When I began to work with watermarks, I began to investigate papers with the royal stamp, the royal seal, which were the papers that were sent to the colonies. In the novel there are two waters, like two different tendencies, there is the water of the pond that is empty and which is supposed to be the marker that tells you how full the aquifer is (which is visible), and then the invisibility of the aquifer that contains water below ground level. So there is an underground tendency and a visible one. Sorry to link the novel to other works again, but in the video Aljubs i Grups, which is being shown at Manifesta, there is a strange rap or spoken word, where a gesture of overflow and another of underflow are mentioned, like a subcurrent or overcurrent. It is also a way of understanding all that is said, marked, the overflow of things and the dates set and visibly established, as well as all the lies, all the social strata that can exist beneath this, like the undercurrent that is also generated. The aquifer also gave me the image of the invisible in the novel. Aquifers create a lot of violence because they are one of the few commons that remain, as I have seen in my little village.

“The wars of the future will be wars for water.”

C.M.: You also used watermarks in the work for the Alhambra prizes to introduce Palestine, “From the River to the Sea,” which was also present there in the background.

C.P.: Yes, well, it was very difficult for me. It has been very difficult for me this year to work on water and watermarks, and spaces of the Silk Road. Each one has its differences, but the history of the Reconquista seems to me to be very similar to the justification of Israel’s occupation, the idea of ​​a holy land that belongs to them. The violence of saying, that was mine and therefore I can do an ethnic cleansing, create an ethno-state, and I keep what I claim as mine, right? The Reconquista is a fallacy, it is a lie that that was theirs, their Re-. And for Israel, too. So in this way is like an underflow. Like the currents below, the lies, the dates which are set and the names. A visible current is what you mark, what you inscribe on the walls, with marks or in legal text. What is below is the fallacy that you introduce to people, this cantarella to be repeated.

It was devastating for me to read that sentence again during the Gaza genocide and to realize that the first thing they do is go for the aquifers. It is precisely in the aquifer areas where Israel attacks, in the West Bank, too, that is why they want the area, because below it are the aquifers, destroying the only way to survive. That sentence stuck with me. These are not the wars of the future; they are the wars of the present. I am researching another work. There are some Spanish castles next to my town, and they are towers-water tanks for defense, and below them are the aquifers. These defense towers survived thanks to the aquifer below. Well, of course, one is subsistence and the other defense, and we know which is which.

I think that works of art are not just that. They also have to work as post-viewing devices. You know how you can go to see a work of art and then leave and it gets you talking about other things.

C.M.: Absolutely. I also read the novel in that perspective, like a microcosm of that town, like a space of resonance through which foreign conflicts are filtered.

C.P.: You know, it’s curious that the novel began with an article in A*DESK. In fact, if you search on their website there is an artícle which is actually a short story, and it’s the first two pages of the novel.

C.M.: Really? I didn’t know that.

C.P.: Yes, I left it there and after a while, as I had taken many written notes, I put them together and wrote the book. But it all began with an article in A*DESK. So when you asked me for the article I thought, oh, my goodness, I’m going to end up writing another novel!

C.M.: (Laughter)

C.P.: In the end, it was just a little window of a document that was always open on my computer. Sometimes I would go in and move some commas around and that was all. It was very comforting to have it open. The real writing took two summers, very compressed. I went to the locations, to the places that appear in the novel, and took notes. That’s why in the end it turned out to be such visual writing, because I was sitting there with a puddle of water next to me.

(Featured image: Dry pond in Capellades (Barcelona). Courtesy of the artist.)