Stakeout Act by Jorge Yeregui at Tabacalera

Description of the project by David Armengol.

If we stop looking at the landscape as if it were the object of an industry we could suddenly discover a lot of undecided spaces, devoid of function, to which it is difficult to give a name. This set neither belongs to the domain of the shadow, nor to the light one. It is situated on its banks.
Gilles Clément

That zero panorama seemed to contain "ruins in reverse", which means, every construction that will eventually be built. This is the opposite of the "romantic ruin" because the buildings do not fall in ruins after building them, but reach the state of ruin before being built.
Robert Smithson

My form of art is a short journey through the landscape on foot (...). All we have to take from a landscape are photographs.
Hamish Fulton

When Jorge Yeregui showed me the first images that were likely to form part of his exhibition at the Fragua in Tabacalera - abandoned buildings, landscapes ruled by concrete-, I could not help but think of one of the most emblematic proposals of the history of land art: the tour of the "monuments" of Passaic river in New Jersey, conducted by Robert Smithson in September 1967. An itinerary through the industrial suburbs of his hometown in which the artist gave the treatment of ‘monument’ to diverse residual structures found while walking: a wooden-steel bridge, a pumping a platform over the river, a series of pipes, a wooden box filled with sand. Just wandering, without intervening in the place, Smithson reactivated a landscape that had lost its use, and therefore its time. His experience in Passaic blurred conventions from the past, present and future that we are used to use in our perception of a territory. The ‘Ruin in reverse’ will then open a new kind of relation between architecture and nature.

More intuitive than premeditated, the first connection between the industrial waste and Yeregui’s urbanism of abandoned spaces incorporates two fundamental concepts to address the artistic practice of the artist. On the one hand, the performative intensity of his travels through the landscape; on the other, a conceptual analysis that tries to define the idiosyncrasies of those places that, for various reasons, have left halfway between human and natural.

To Yeregui, talking about landscape is also talking about architecture and urbanism. Educated as an Architect, and now a professor at the School of Architecture of Malaga, he soon realized that his relationship with this discipline was not headed to the construction of buildings, but demanded another type of link. In an interview conducted in 2011 by Javier Diaz Guardiola, the artist explains it all in the following way: “At college, I realized that I was more interested in the city as a space for thinking rather than production. I understand the city as an area one hundred percent artificial and fully man-made. In it, we can find it condensed certain reflections of how society is at any given time. Because it involves factors such as design, economic, cultural, aesthetic, social or environmental conditions… My work as a photographer looks for that kind of situation. "

Easy and straightforward, this comment sums up his discursive position. While at the beginning of his words, the artist places his field research in the search for some definition of city, in the final part he exhibits his methodology: a thorough exploration that analyzes -neither prioritizing, not enhancing- the many aspects that determine the configuration of landscape. And there appears again the entropy of Smithson. Far from any pre-established hierarchy, any element of the environment is sensitive to be designated as monument (Smithson’s non-objectual art), any architectural detail is likely to fantasize about what happened (Yeregui’s photographic track down). In both cases, the reflexive development does not intend to issue an ethical or moral judgment but to open reading layers that cover all options without indicating any. In sum, we are not talking about an art of denunciation, but an art of finding.

In this sense, the interests of Yeregui lead him to connect with various theoreticals of the cityscape. Especially with those who have tried to study the spaces that generate the contemporary city; places defined more by the absence of function than for their particular use. I am referring to the Terrain vague of Ignasi de Solà-Morales or the concept of ‘third landscape’ of Gilles Clément. In the first case, Solà-Morales claims the genuine identity of these spaces, claiming their value as a contemporary ruin without the need to reconvert them into productive places. In the second, Clement defines a type of landscape that is not natural and is not urban. A hybrid landscape, located between the impassive force of nature and the failure of human artifice.