A
cemetery is not a tomb. It is
rather, a relationship with the landscape and with forgetting: imprints like
abstract signs, an abstraction that begins with walking and with tracing the
best path with one’s steps.
Walking
produces a furrow that is a path of coming and going: the tombs will be in its
interior and trees will make the space dense, like characters inhabiting the
shadows of the walls produced by the cut in the earth. A modest pavement, in cement and wood,
gathers dust and fallen dried leaves.
The
chapel is found where the entry path widens in a clearing and the descent
toward the tombs begins. One
begins to forget the brutal industral surroundings and concentrates on the
natural topography of this place, the valley formed by a small stream…
It
has always seemed that we were working in a place where this project already
existed; it seemed complete to me from the very first breaking of the
earth. The memories are deposited
in the fissures of the tombs, the vegetation fills the empty spaces of the
embankment, and the shadows begin to act as a clock.
–
Enric Miralles, “Mixed Talks”
