miralles' narrative

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”