In Retrato-Plano, the shots portray workers’ faces whose carnality and gazes are confused by the overlaying of technical drawings of buildings silk printed on glass.
Cargueros, Barcelona is the last work specifically realized for the exhibition at Espronceda, a series of shots narrates the meetings with migrant workers arrived in the city to offer their labour, asked by the artist to wear a carrier on their shoulders, a chair held by straps reaching over the top of their heads, like the ones with which Latin American men were forced to carry colonisers. The tensed bodies are burdened with maquettes made of terracotta – an atypical material highlighting the transformation of earth from raw into building material – and reproducing big buildings symbols of Barcelona’s contemporary architecture, while you can see the actual ones in the background of the photographs.
It is a play of staggered representations, between photographs and maquettes, making the original question of the exhibition more and more pressing, and stimulating others: who are these cities built for? at what cost?
The choice of these three works conveys three different aspects of the attempt to rethink the body in the urban space. The body denounces the exertion and the effort which underlie a disproportioned activity of construction far from the needs and desires of the citizens. The body stresses the marginality of the people handling and themselves turning into construction material. The focus on the sense of life expressed through the medium of photography – although without any pretence at being documentaristic – triggers a conceptual short circuit: keeping to the visual representation, it seems to claim its insufficiency, questioning the limits of images, of what we want to see and what they want us to see in the modern metropolis beyond the dream of development.
Juan Sandoval. De la mano, su huella n° 3 – (detail). Photography, digital print on aluminium and collage. 200 x 150 cm. 2017
ph. Vitor Schietti