The inhabitants of Terres de l'Ebre live in a threatened territory. On Daniel de la Barra's first visit to the heart of the Ebro Delta, in 2021, he is invited by the Centre Lo Pati to carry out an artistic residency in Balada, together with the anthropologist María Faciolince. The project is conceived as a reconstruction of the narrative of the landscape that sustains and perpetuates extractive practices from the industry. It is a record of images of socio-environmental violence of a political and historical nature, reminiscent of the botanical expeditions that consolidated ways of looking at nature as a land of conquest. As references, the illustrated books of botanical expeditions, the paintings of traveling artists in Latin America and the romantic landscape of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The exhibition at the Joan Prats Gallery is the result of this research, translated into an installation that brings together different media: painting, sculpture, poems, music, video, documents... A new ecosystem recreated from the space of art. The representation arises as a need to respond to a complex scenario dominated by political, social and economic forces that (dis) structure it. This territory subjugated him then and he has not ceased to delve into it through his skin, the deepest. He has explored its lands and, immersed in them, the fundamental encounter with its people arises. Proof of this, the close collaboration with Josep Pinyol, the composition and musical interpretation of Lluís Martínez, on the organ of the church of Santa Bárbara, and the poems recited by Miquel Curto, in Tivenys.

The author films and photographs the territory body to body, as if it were reflected in a negative mirror. And he transfers his voice to those Black Flags, one of the devices used in the Delta to scare away migratory birds, today subverted as messages of resistance: This illusory reverse flight escapes from the bombs to the silent surface on the other side... A furrow of earth is present in the exhibition, just as we find it in the rice fields to plough the fields; the author recalls the gesture of Walter de Maria who elevated it to artistic matter in The New York Earth Room, 1977, what better way to dignify it. On the ground, some paintings like art nouveau carpets that allude to the natural as an ornament of urban life. They represent two species of native plants essential to the wetlands of the Ebro, the salicornias and crassulaceae, which the ecosystem produces to establish its own balance. As in a great historical canvas, we witness the current dispute in the system between agribusiness and ecology.

How to make this land sustainable? The Delta is one of the most important wetlands in Europe, where research, led by biologist Lynn Margulis, has shown the presence of bacteria that coincide with those that populated the earth 2,000 million years ago, essential data for evolutionary microbiology. For decades, science has been warning us of the dangerous consequences of our model of unlimited growth and extraction and the need for a change of course. In our country, Jorge Riechmann is one of the voices that has most lucidly outlined the profile of this ecosocial crisis and maintains that worrying about things that overflow us is an art that must be cultivated as an impossibility (Ed. Árdora, 2022).

Josep Maria Mallarach, another critical voice against the environmental policy of the Ebro wetland, defends it as one of the sacred natural spaces in technologically developed countries. He states that the main threat to the permanence of the delta is due to the fact that all the large dams and reservoirs in its basin retain about 90% of sediments. In addition, the development of irrigation in the middle basin (arid area of Aragon) diverts a large part of its flow. As a result, the delta suffers a strong regression. The hydrological plan of the Ebro basin - as denounced by environmental NGOs and the new water culture - does not correct these threats, but adapts to the pressures of the lobbies of the hydroelectric companies and intensive agriculture. The second major threat is the global rise in sea level, due to the melting of the polar ice caps, as a result of the global climate crisis caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases.

The last paintings in the exhibition represent the cartography of Terres de l'Ebre seen from satellite, from the tenebrism, as a great still life. And the songbook, the ballad composed by the artist, has been transformed into a counter-power, language and music are his weapons, and it goes like this: As a song of lost love, which questions the ways of inhabiting and looking at this landscape, a love taken away, without sediment, with the tools of control and the functions exercised by contemporary visual practice to perpetuate the patterns of its spectacularization.

Daniel de la Barra is currently a resident at the Spanish Academy in Rome. This is where this collaboration begins, where the artist and the curator decide to develop this project. They travel to the Ebro estuary, he from Rome and she from Madrid. Coincidentally, on their trip they both read María Zambrano, he La Razón Poética, she Claros del Bosque, and they travel for days through the exiled and exiled territories of the Ebro Delta.