The asymmetry of landscape: Aesthetics, agency, and material reuse in the Reserva Ecológica de Buenos Aires

Abstract

Situated on the edge of Buenos Aires, perched on the mudflats between downtown and the river, the Reserva Ecológica is 864 acres (350 ha) of public landscape. In the 1980s, at the end of the military dictatorship, cultural and hydrogeological forces combined to produce an excess of construction debris, dredged material, political action, and alluvium that aggregated here to form the Reserva. This piece identifies the appropriation and reuse of waste products in an estuarine megacity as the raw material for this civic landscape and argues for the importance of an aesthetics of asymmetry in the formation of democratic public life. Human and non-human actors are situated in a landscape where radically different means and forms of entanglement and novelty are the norm. In the Reserva, asymmetrical processes have resulted in an aesthetics beyond meaning, a new landscape, and new publics.