Gardens & Walls

Teresa Soto is a writer and scholar based in Madrid. She has published six poetry books. The last collection, Crónicas de I., was awarded the Margarita Hierro International Poetry Prize in 2019.

In La ciudad que huye (“The City On The Run”, 2006), filmmaker Lucrecia Martel shows us maps with a growing number of completely private residential areas in Argentina. They have private security, schools, sport centres, shopping malls. She shows nothing of the inside of these areas. Instead, the camera films concrete walls. Sometimes we see the filmmaker’s back as she shows her ID to the security guards; the word safety is repeated in conversations half-heard from the car seat. However, more than safe, the viewer feels at once surveyed and expelled. Another unsettling element is how plants contribute to the separation, lending a sense of naturalness to the isolation. Apart from the walls, the camera sometimes turns to the other side and we see “the opposite neighbours,” as the subtitles put it. They go by bike, they stop at crosswalks. We see their houses, their street markets; a donkey.

Recently, I have been exploring the concept of the political garden. In England in the eighteenth century, there were discussions about gardens and how they represent ideas. The association between formal gardens and order, and naturalistic gardens and freethinking, seems almost too obvious, but it was often at the core of these debates. It never occurred to me that the wild, naturalistic garden could also be used as camouflage for community separation. Covered with ivy, how do the grey walls look? More natural? Invisible? Nature as a resource of invisibility.

More than cities on the run, the residential areas explored by Martel seem to wish for disappearance, a mutating organism that wants to be self-sufficient. It makes me think of soldiers, dressed in green and brown. It makes me think of muddy faces and branches attached to bodies, like in bad war movies. One stays silent and wishes to disappear from the view of the neighbours across the way. The other moves fast to advance and attack. Which one is which? Communities playing hide and seek, with no desire to be caught.

Ballard also comes to mind: wasn’t Pangbourne Village, in his novel Running Wild (1988), a neighbourhood exactly like one of these suburban areas in Buenos Aires? La ciudad que huye lasts less than five minutes. In Running Wild, the massacre also takes place in a matter of minutes, which is what leads the investigators to suspect that it must have been performed by a group of people acting simultaneously. Clue or not, when reading the novel, the rapidity of the events creates an intensification of the fear and a sense almost of haziness, more than efficiency – something that happens so fast we cannot even register it.

I don’t know if I am talking here about rate, trauma or scale. Does scale matter? There was an idea I read years ago in Civil Wars, a collection of essays by Enzensberger, on how micro (or molecular) wars are always being waged in nearly every society. He understood this as a sort of civil war. Lately I find myself thinking about Enzensberger – not opening the book, just looking at it from a distance the same way an insect might look at us when we are out in nature. On the other hand, I realize I look at Martel’s images in a very different way - less like an insect and more like an emergency hammer, the way I look at the red box, wondering about the consistency of the glass, asking myself if I will be able to break it.