Entre: Landscape as the Spatialization of Time, The Case of Guarapiranga

Entre: paisagem como espacialização do tempo — o caso da Guarapiranga
ENG: In Between: Landscape as the Spatialization of Time — The Case of Guarapiranga

2020/2021

Critical research / Urban history / Landscape studies

Escola da Cidade, São Paulo

Marina Lickel

Ana Carolina Tonetti

Final thesis, Architecture and Urbanism

Printed publication, 349 pages

Entre is a critical research and editorial project that takes the Guarapiranga reservoir, on the southern edge of São Paulo, as a territory through which to investigate landscape as a spatial expression of time. Starting from Altamiro Bessa’s reading of landscape as the place where time and space become articulated, and from Rosário Assunto’s distinction between temporalidade and temporaneidade, the work reads Guarapiranga not as a natural background or an empty void in the urban fabric, but as a constructed landscape where memory, infrastructure, speculation, ecology, and metropolitan expansion are continuously inscribed. Built between 1906 and 1909 by São Paulo Light and Power Co. and later incorporated into the city’s water supply system, the reservoir becomes a horizontal counterform to São Paulo’s vertical growth: a body of water projected to sustain the metropolis, while exposing the environmental and social contradictions that produced it.

The research approaches time through Peter Pál Pelbart’s reading of temporal experience as something produced by different operators and technologies, in dialogue with Pierre Lévy’s distinction between oral, written, and informatic societies. Rather than treating circular, linear, and rizomatic temporalities as a historical sequence, Entre observes how these regimes coexist and overlap in the territory. The Guarapiranga reservoir is read through the linear time of engineering, industrialization, and progress; through the abstract metropolitan time of labor, commuting, artificial light, controlled interiors, and channelized rivers; and through forms of cyclical time that remain tied to horizon, recurrence, climate, and bodily experience. In this sense, the landscape does not offer an escape from the city, but a way to read its temporal contradictions. Following Michel Serres’s notion of a folded, multitemporal history, Guarapiranga appears as a territory where construction, memory, depletion, leisure, infrastructure, and future scarcity are not successive chapters, but simultaneous layers.

Structured as a visual essay, the publication moves between theoretical writing, urban history, archival research, cartography, image editing, field observation, and personal memory. Authors such as Ricardo Araújo, Carlos Leonardi, Marussia Whately, Pilar Cunha, Paula Santoro, and Luciana Ferrara ground the historical and socio-environmental reading of the reservoir.