Eduardo Corales
geral@campoarquitectura.com
Architect, PhD student in architecture at ISCTE/IUL, Researcher at Dinâmia’CET, Lisbon, Portugal.
For citation: CORALES, Eduardo – POWEPOINT: a graphic and audiovisual record of Portuguese dams. Estudo Prévio 22. Lisbon: CEACT/UAL – Centre for Architecture, City and Territory Studies of the Autonomous University of Lisbon, 2023, p. 31-47. ISSN: 2182-4339 [Available at: www.estudoprevio.net]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26619/2182-4339/22EV
Review received on 28 April 2023 and accepted for publication on 2 May 2023.
Creative Commons, licença CC BY-4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
POWERPOINT: a graphic and audiovisual record of Portuguese dams
Abstract
Energy infrastructure is a material infrastructure that allows the production, transport and storage of different forms of energy (power plants and grids, oil pipelines, gas pipelines). It is the artifact that transforms and channels the elements of the environment (water, air, energy, resources) into flows, fluids or combustible matter. Infrastructure is the engine of the territory that is transformed1.
The POWERPOINT project is a research initiated in 2019, together with CEACT/UAL and with the support of the EDP Foundation, which aims to build the first graphic and audiovisual record of Portugal’s hydroelectric history, from the presentation of thirty paradigmatic cases in the conformation of the system of electrical production infrastructures, using various means of graphic and audiovisual representation. This material is part of the doctoral thesis with the same title, in which the relationship between dams, political power and territory as a project is explored.
The representation of territory is not a mere descriptive operation, but one that deals with the epistemological challenges of how to know, understand and study territorial processes and conditions.
The series of images presented here aims to describe the methodology and survey protocol used in the project, which will inform, from different angles, the graphic version of a territorial record.
This inventory aims to graphically expose the elements that started an electric landscape and that can help to understand the complexities, conflicts and the future of these infrastructures, as well as the development of the territory and its changes.
Using drawing as a common field of knowledge, photography as a family chronicle andvideo as a documentary exercise, the project seeks to portray dams by describing their various typologies and contexts.
Keywords: dams, infrastructures, territory, inventory, representation
1 LOPEZ, Fanny – L’ordre électrique. Infrastructures énergétiques et territoires. Génève: Métis Presses, 2019.
