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Dry River

2019–2021

The Toledan Mountains are situated the lower portion of the Spanish Meseta Central, and are home to all of the flora and fauna of their Northern counterparts but in a diminutive scale due to harsher conditions and lower rainfall. This makes them extremely vulnerable to the adverse changes in climate experienced in recent decades.
The Dry River (El Arrollo Marchés) used to provide water to dozens of small allotments and water mills which were carved back from the mountainside by hand over centuries. This infrastructure sustained families for generations and through an intricate system of irrigation, with strict allocations of water, the plots were a vital part of rural existence.
Along with the land itself, all of this has been lain to ruin due to falling precipitation and changing economic models based on speculative capitalism. It is hard to imagine that they will ever return due to the irreparable damage that they have suffered in the last 50 years. Dry River documents the annual cycle of the river and it’s circle of vegetation, where death and decay compost the process of rebirth but now seem to be a harbinger for the end of a rural way life.