An interesting exhibition that opens the debate and a critical reflection on the profusion of cultural facilities, developed in recent decades, which take as a basis the industrial heritage of a past time, to be reconverted programmatically.
A sensory experience is built through installations that combine architectural elements, documentation of layered tours through these institutions, descriptive videos of their activity, evocative quotes and texts, overlays of contemporary and archival images.
Description of project by Jorge Conde
The ruins of this project are the architectural vestiges of industrial facilities that no longer exist: a factory, a slaughterhouse, a power plant, a railway station, an automotive factory, a market, a gas holder, a flour, wool or paper mill, a water tower, shipyards, silos, port warehouses, a funeral parlour. Countless representatives of a system of social organisation and a production model that are familiar yet obsolete, having outlived their function, time and place. This sampling of assorted typologies—a total of 120 locations explored in 16 different European countries over the course of a decade—comprises an archive of “faked” documents with no hierarchical order, a kaleidoscopic, arbitrary, vague tally of hybrid architectures which, by their very nature, avoid immutability.
However, this obsolescence decreed by evolution is not exactly abandonment or absence. To me it feels more like liminality, reinvention and transition, because in these places, now inhabited by others and used for different purposes, the memory of the industrial society and its erstwhile protagonists still lingers beneath the surface. The memory of those who came before us, some known and others, the majority, omitted from the official annals of history.
I approached the project from the perspective of an explorer with a keen interest in archaeology, its principles and forms of representation. Armed with the experience gleaned from previous investigations, I decided to embark on a campaign of meticulous, intense fieldwork, free of nostalgia but never rushed: I resolved to search every building for traces of industrial architecture and its transformation into an architecture which might have better prospects, to discover the intersection of unrelated functions that were often worlds apart, and intergenerational dialogue—in other words, an exchange between societies based on different values and production models and, if I may put it this way, the traffic between an extinct and an existing society. I wanted to detect and retrieve the memory of those functional architectural structures, predominantly instrumental anonyme skulpturen[1], squeeze the last vestiges of that life they once had and give meaning to the transformations and renovations they have undergone in recent times, a meaning suited and perhaps necessary to this contemporary era.
[These Ruins You (Don’t) See] takes the form of an immersive experience along with an enormous collection of interrelated photographic and video documents that also converse with the quasi-theatrical spaces of Tabacalera. Selected documents, stratified, evanescent itineraries, evocative texts, overlaps of current and archive images, simulated sound recreations constructed from ambient sounds and contemporary interpolations that imitate functional movement and life before and after transformation. An experience that aspires to stimulating timelessness as a strategy for reflection.
[1] Bernd and Hilla Becher, Anonyme Skulpturen:Eine Typologie Technischer Bauten(Düsseldorf: Art-Press Verlag, 1970).
