The Soil Remembers, The Garden Responds
This project reimagines Barcelona’s Zona Franca as a post-natural landscape shaped by industrial soil pollution, especially hexavalent chromium. Through speculative storytelling, bioremediation science, and visual narratives, it explores how ecosystems, humans, and synthetic organisms might coexist with contamination, not to restore purity—but to adapt, survive, and form new ecological bonds.
1- THE PROMISE BELOW
The soil of Zona Franca unfurling like a garden at the edge of the sea breathing with life,fertile and waiting.
This was no paradise lost, but one suspended in promise…. Adam and Eve did not fall into this eden – they descended with purpose, eyes wide to its mineral promise. They did not eat the fruit.
They mined the roots.
We built.
We paved.
We burned.
Zona Franca bloomed not with figs and olives, but with factories and forges. Where once rained life, now leaked chromium.
Each day, Eden was not guarded by angels – but by cranes and concrete.
The Productos Electrolíticos slowly breathed its hexavalent chromium (Cr⁶⁺) through the veins of the soil; invisible, and lethal.
The roots that reach for water cling to toxic winds and rusted veins.
Eden did not vanish – it was reforged, repurposed, and contaminated by the very hands meant to tend it.
And so, the land remembers.
And the Garden of Consequence blooms next door.
2- THE GARDEN OF CONSEQUENCE
Beneath the ash of Zona Franca’s ambitions, the garden stirs once more. Leaves now rewired to sensors. The Amphibians return cautiously to the poisoned pools hinting at its deterioration.
Eden, flowing with chromium-laced blood, crackles with multispectral data, a new testimony.
Adam and Eve call out to their allies, the invertebrates – sentinels of contamination and agents of repair.
As they burrow, feed, and breathe, they reveal the health of the land and help break down toxic legacies from within.
In their fragile bodies, they carry the memory of what has passed—and the promise of what might return.
Phytoremediation plants do not bloom with innocence but with intent – armed with metabolisms that alchemize poison into potential.
The earthworms wriggle to satiate themselves from the constant attack of hexavalent chromium.
Adam and Eve, in a jeopardy–an awakening must take place.
This is not reclamation. It is a confession.
And still, the garden testifies.
3- THE SYNTHETIC FOREST
Adam and Eve call out to the Garden of Consequence to join hands in filtering Cr⁶⁺ to Cr³⁺.
They push out these acidic elements, seeking to render them biodegradable.
Out of a surge of life and innovation, Cain and Abel, the Chromecore Twins, are born.
Chromecores are made from living systems—bacteria, enzymes, and roots—designed to capture toxic Cr⁶⁺ and transform it into the safer Cr³⁺ through sculpted bioremediation forms.
Abel quickly realizes these violent ions are unstable, spreading fast, merging with the landscapes of soil.
He calls upon microbial allies—Pseudomonas, Bacillus, and Shewanella—who breathe electrons into Cr⁶⁺, reducing it to Cr³⁺ in dark, oxygen-poor chambers of soil.
They are fed with carbon-rich elements that keep the cycle alive. Cain joins the fight above ground, rallying the invertebrates who burrow and churn, disrupting Cr⁶⁺’s mobility.
He plants deep-rooted phytoremediators—living filters who drink carefully, slowly binding what was once poison.
Adam, Eve, and the Chromecore Twins no longer seek Eden. They protect a new covenant between land, species, and society.
From contamination came culture. From trauma, a park. From Cr⁶⁺, a covenant.
