Badlands

In Corinne Silva’s Badlands (2008–2011) the photographic event is not centred on the depiction of human action but, rather, the traces of its effect which can be detected in the borderland territories located at the edges of Europe. The Badlands series documents two forms of architecture constructed by the denizens inhabiting the frontier spaces of Almería in southeast Spain. The first is the strange landscaped environs … that decorate the luxury housing settlements of the region. The second is the improvised dwellings that irregular migrants fashion from the discarded refuse of agricultural polytunnels.

Silva analyses the points of overlap between these two parallel worlds that seem to deny each other’s existence. Informed by anthropological studies of transnational migration and the critical urbanism of architects like Teddy Cruz, Silva’s expanded practice of photography foregrounds the collisions between natural and artificial ecologies that result from large-scale agricultural and property development.