Margen Negado

Abstract

As a border element, urban walls occupy the place of ‘the between’ and establish their ambiguous territorialities of both belonging and exclusion in the areas in which they are. This article specifically addresses the Mauá Avenue Wall, on the edge of the port area of the city of Porto Alegre, Brazil. This non-monument is a line, a drawing, a three-dimensional planar and longitudinal object. The pertinence of its construction in the 1970s and of its permanence in 2021 is linked to collective imagination of stories that have overlapped for more than two centuries, and to specific political decisions that reshape the way we occupy and practice our everyday belonging to urban areas. Its interference in the urban landscape is absolutely poignant, since the wall imposes itself as a fracture in the perception of connections between the Porto Alegre’s distinct biomes and public coexistence spaces. While for many it remains invisible, naturalized and solitary in its extension and protects us from the invasion of waters, others need approximation so that by perceiving its materiality, they can question the importance of its permanence or the need for its fall. Because its existence makes the city consistently deny not only its vocation as a port, but also its waters, its liquid edge and, above all, its generosity when looking across the river, and thus refuses to reclaim a city that intended to be another, before the wall.