The Standstill Architecture series shows through a series of fourteen photographs the consequences of negligent projects of the time, which identify the landscape with the territory, taking the identity of the place for granted. Through his images, Bergera makes the user participate in the conflict to stimulate knowledge and the possibility of thinking of new models for the future.
Description by Chus Tudelilla
The economic crisis in Spain produced the cease and abandonment of aspiring andoutstanding facilities conceived to fulfill amusement luxury during those happy years of wellbeing and abundance. The aspiring restoration of the old Balneario of Panticosa, located on the heart of the Spanish Pyrenees, and its transformation into a luxurious and modern tourist resort was suddenly vanished, producing for example the closure of the Gran Hotel designed by Rafael Moneo, the cessation of the construction —at its very ending stage— of the High-Performance Sports Center designed by Alvaro Siza or the abandonment of an impressive parking building anchored to the mountain.
In December 2011, Iñaki Bergera, architect and photographer, began photographing the abandonment of the Panticosa spa facilities. Since then his gaze has been on the walls that make up the buildings and translate the ideas of those who projected them, and on the failure of an architecture unable to create emotions without anyone to inhabit it.Many photographs of the spa’s years of splendour are preserved, which testify to a time of rest in a remote place, to the shelter of a landscape in continuous change due to its unstable dynamics that, in the sequence of images captured by Bergera, seems to infect the remains of building materials that abruptly detach, cover the surface of the floors and spill out into the landscape claiming their natural origin.Scrap metal, garbage, dirt and weeds notify the moment when everything was put on hold and began the deterioration that is progressing undisturbed by witnessing the consequences of negligent projects that identify the landscape with the territory, ignoring the identity of the place. Bergera involves us in the conflict with the intention of stimulating knowledge and the possibility of thinking about new models for the future.
