Badlands
Badlands is ongoing work that explores the contested border territory of Almeria in south east Spain. Almeria still bears the traces of past empires: crumbling watchtowers guard the coastline and Moorish castles compete for space with ancient Catholic churches. This desert terrain is being rapidly transformed by intensive agricultural development alongside a proliferation of golf courses and hotel complexes. Increasingly visible in the landscape is plastic, innovatively used and reused. Surrounding the enclosed megastructures of industry and leisure are the improvised dwellings of migrant workers made from this material. Alongside a study of this barren region’s architectural fortresses and the wilderness beyond, I use plastic to examine the authentic and artificial in a landscape dramatically shaped by the connected forces of economic migration, agriculture and tourism.
Almeria is located on what architect Teddy Cruz defines as the ‘new political equator’, which intersects the contested desert territories of Southern Spain/North Africa, USA/Mexico and Israel/Occupied Palestinian Territories. Cruz emphasizes that these border spaces are critical hubs where the societies of overproduction and excess in the global North meet the sectors of scarcity in the global South. Almeria can be seen as a microcosm of the globalised economy and serves as a prism through which to focus a visual exploration of the current politics of fear manifested at these critical thresholds.
Corinne Silva 2010
Corinne Silva’s photographs of modern Andalucia play with the way in which ideologies and fantasies are embedded in the spaces of the built environment. Contemporary southern Spain with its golf courses, new developments, tomato farms and Western movie sets is home to the new citizens of post-industrialist society – North African migrants, golf tourists, the retired. Her photographs trace the archaeology of artifice from the monumental fibreglass rocks that decorate the gardens of new settlements and that preside over the boundary between the desert and the sweet artificial green of the cultivated lawns, to the other mountains formed from discarded plastic from the polytunnels that stretch out of the desert towards the sea. They trace the journey from the fantastic suburban palaces built for wealthy retirees, through to those other relics of a broken fantasy – the migrant dwellings, packaged together out of sheets of agricultural plastic tied together with string. Silva’s drifting documentary eye fastens precisely upon those many moments when our fantasy life invades reality, when the world presents itself to us as, in some sense, ‘already photographed’. Her skill is in moving between the fabulousness of the simulacrum to the conditions that underpin its very material existence.
Joanna Lowry 2009