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"Aëdes" 
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Imel Sierra Cabrera
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Espacio Tangente
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Barbosa Express Bridge in Arecibo

The disruptive infrastructure over the plain and the river calls for conciliatory initiatives between us and our environment. Art may be the perfect vehicle to alleviate the bittersweet aftertaste of a landscape intervened by engineering.
About the Area
A century of industrial development has altered landscape in ways that range from the disturbingly beautiful to the vulgarly casual. Our culture seems capable of acknowledging the aesthetic possibilities of utilitarian objects when beauty is perceived in the polychromy of a freshly-painted bridge. The ornamentation of utilitarian objects is perhaps the most outstanding symptom of a collective aesthetic that negotiates local taste with the inevitable presence of the global. Bridges, freeways, retaining walls, and inclines, shape the language of engineering, which drives and dominates us, in an increasingly modern and brutally ephemeral world.
Aphorism

Technical description:
Aëdes (10 mosquitoes)
Site: Total length of the bridge on Road PR 22, in Arecibo
Materials: Corten steel

An invasion, a line, a movement.... The strategy of Aëdes is to make visible the scale of the plain, of the city limits, and of the freeway. Such spaces, given their immediate undefinedness, are the perfect setting for the apparition of these beings, inhabitants of the empty zones of the route. These giant mosquitoes stress the rhythm and synchronized direction of the automobile, its speed, and the openness of the esplanade.  

Aëdes are a series of companions that, in addition to preceding the departure from, and arrival to, Arecibo, create a circuit of linkages, establishing a relationship of scale between the infrastructure of the freeway, the vast natural emptiness, the silhouette of the city, and passengers in the fast space. All features of the pieces complement the contour of the landscape, and are in harmony with natural space, not invading, but rather blending with it.   

The composition is accomplished through the reiteration of 10 corten-steel structures, covered by a stainless-steel mesh (mosquito net). Located at intervals and paired in uneven groups, (at the expressway median) their recurrence highlights the elevation of the bridge, which normally seems to be an extension of the road, ignoring its position in the air space above the valley.
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