I am very honored to have been invited by Ana Berruguete and Maíra Villela of PHotoEspaña to exhibit my ANONYMIZATIONproject in this year’s photo festival. This is a very renowned international photo festival which has been taking place every summer in Madrid since having started in 1998. I have participated a few times in their Descubrimientos portfolio reviews since 2005 and also had the honor of exhibiting ANONYMIZATION at their Galería La Fábrica in 2014. This time the work will be shown in the gallery of a very innovative travel agency, B Travel Xperience, in the center of Madrid, which is one of the participating spaces of the festival. It has been a great pleasure collaborating with María Soriano and Mariano Gijón of B Travel Xperience in organizing the exhibition. I am very grateful to everyone for all of their hard work to bring my exhibition to the public. If you are in Madrid, please stop by and also check out the many other photo exhibitions all over the city that are part of PHotoEspaña.

PHotoEspaña 2024
Invited Exhibition Space –
B Travel Xperience
c/ Miguel Ángel, 33
28003 Madrid
SPAIN

June 19 – September 6, 2024

(Installation photos by María Soriano and Ignacio Evangelista.)

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ANONYMIZATION – Statement:

All across the world a uniform, homogeneous model of development, inspired by Los Angeles style urban sprawl – consisting of massive freeways, parking lots, shopping malls and large-scale master-planned communities with golf courses – is being stamped onto the earth’s topography. The foundation of this urbanistic model is the automobile and the freeway, and large quantities of fossil fuel. This globalized model of architecture does not respect or adapt itself to the natural or cultural environment onto which it is implanted. With this anonymous type of development not only comes the destruction of the environment, but also a loss of culture and roots, as well as alienation.  As we have seen in recent history, fervent overdevelopment has led to crises, not only financial, but also environmental and social, and some even say psychological.

German-American photographer Robert Harding Pittman began working on his project Anonymization in Los Angeles in the late 1990’s. For more than a decade he traveled around the world photographing the spread of “L.A. style urban sprawl” in Las Vegas (USA), Spain, France, Germany, Greece, Dubai (UAE) and South Korea. The world was in the midst of a construction boom when the project began and by the end, most cranes had come to a screeching halt – when the world found itself in the midst of the global financial crisis of 2008.

The project is structured in a cycle, divided into four stages, beginning and ending with the ground:

1> Sacred Ground: Ground domesticated. Ground broken, remolded and covered

with asphalt, concrete, lawns, decorative trees.

2> Conversion: Developments erected.

3> Prefabricated: Finished anonymous developments.

4> Aftermath: Overbuilding results in crises. Decay.

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“These images–many of them haunting in an arid way – remind us by contrast of how much we long for real places, real texture, real homes, real communities. In many cases they’re the face of the housing bust – but also some much deeper bust, in the way we’ve been thinking (or not) about the world.”

– Bill McKibben, environmentalist and author