Invisible Stream

Buenos Aires has a distant relationship with its landscape. Built on a wetland and surrounded by a huge and calm river, today it is crossed by streams that were piped during the last century and now run hidden, under the concrete. This film follows the traces of the Medrano stream. There, where it flows but cannot be seen, it is full of buildings under construction, there is a park, a former clandestine detention center, a neighborhood assembly, a public library, a train, a highway, a popular neighborhood and an artificial lake.

Invisible Stream is the archives of an exploration. It takes the form of an undulating and sinuous drift that makes secret stories emerge, where streams are a place of resistance. Thus, a song emerges about Maldonado, the woman who fled from the conquering fort and survived, allying herself with a puma and the Querandí community. We see the inaccessible estuary and discover the revolutionaries who tried to assassinate the dictator, installing dynamite through a piped stream. Peering through storm drains, the Ningunistas appear, organizing clandestine expeditions over the Internet.

The film becomes liquid and flows between images intervened by humidity, archives of rainfall from other times, maps, garbage that the water returns to the city and amateur recordings. The world is going through a climatic imbalance that in Buenos Aires is expressed in historic storms. How does the memory of water survive the destruction of its ecosystem? From the depths of the city, the stream resurfaces, occupying the place from which it has been displaced.