Badlands
Along the frontier territory of Almeria, south-east Spain, the desert landscape is being rapidly transformed by intensive agricultural development, golf courses and hotel complexes.
Almeria is located on the ‘new political equator’, which intersects the contested territories of southern Spain and northern Africa, the USA Mexico borderlands and Israel-Palestine. Along these connected desert frontier-lands the global south and the global north intersect and overlap. This occurs despite the north’s attempts to barricade itself from the underdeveloped south – itself a result of the North’s economic draining and political indifference.
Increasingly visible in the Almerian landscape is plastic, innovatively used and reused. In the wilderness beyond the synthetic architectural fortresses of industry and leisure lie the improvised dwellings of African migrant workers, made from salvaged plastic. In Badlands I use plastic to examine the authentic and artificial as well as product and waste, and by extension, wasted humans. Through plastic as both marker and metaphor, I explore how ideologies and fantasies are projected onto this desert landscape, which is being dramatically shaped by the connected forces of economic and lifestyle migration.
Corinne Silva 2011
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, Between the Hallucinatory and the Real exhibition catalogue, 2009