Agua Agua

Agua, Água is a research and reflection project launched by the CLIMAVORE platform that analyses the reality of the major river basins in Spain and Portugal. Water flows regardless of borders, yet it carries with it the consequences of human activity: from the drying up of wetlands and pollution caused by large-scale farms to pharmaceutical waste and the impact of dams. All this pollution accumulates invisibly underground, and its composition is transforming our relationship with this vital resource.

With the support of the Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation and the Montemadrid Foundation, the programme fosters a multidisciplinary dialogue between hydrology, agronomy, environmental law, journalism and civic organisation. Its aim is to promote initiatives such as the demolition of obsolete dams, the fight against intensive livestock farming, and agricultural practices that protect the soil. It also seeks to revive knowledge of traditional infrastructure—cisterns, irrigation ditches and canals—in order to understand aquifers as a shared political space. The project is organised around a steering group that will meet in person throughout 2026 and 2027. In turn, in June 2027, an event open to the public will take place at La Casa Encendida to share some of the insights gained.

The core group will consist of Pao Fernández-Garrido, a forestry engineer and specialist in river restoration; Diego García de Jalón, professor emeritus at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and a specialist in applied river ecology; Maria Ilhéu, an ecologist and associate professor at the University of Évora; Maria Paula Mendes, a hydrogeologist and senior researcher at CERENA; Ana Tudela, an investigative journalist and co-founder of DATADISTA; and Nuria Hernández-Mora, a researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid and representative of the Nueva Cultura del Agua Foundation, an Iberian network promoting sustainable and socially just water management.

The project will be coordinated by Dani Burrows, curator and director of Care at CLIMAVORE; and by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, founders of Cooking Sections and CLIMAVORE.

CLIMAVORE is an interdisciplinary research project launched in 2015 by Cooking Sections, an artistic platform that explores the relationships between food, art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Through site-specific installations, performances and videos, it examines the systems that organise the world through food.