My review of Concrete Geographies by Xavier Ribas (Bside Books, 2012) is now available on photo-eye. You can get a copy of the book here.
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Spread throughout Europe, the Roma constitute one of the largest ethnic
minorities in the region. More commonly known as gypsies, the Roma are
also among the most routinely persecuted and reviled. Dismissed as
thieves and vagrants, the Roma's traditional nomadic lifestyle often
places them at odds with the cultures they inhabit. Constantly seen as
outsiders, they are regularly driven from their homes, or simply pushed
to the fringes and displaced. On February 24th of 2004, over 60 Roma
families were forcibly evicted from an industrial plot on the outskirts
of Barcelona. Workers drilled and upturned the landscape, turning what
was once a concrete lot into ravaged and brutal landscape of cement
slabs and coarse rocks. Xavier Riba's Concrete Geographies
[Nomads] offers an intimate and affecting picture of this willfully
torn landscape. While Ribas never shows the people or lives of the
displaced, his restrained images show us a landscape of discrimination,
displacement and social injustice.
All images © Xavier Ribas and Bside Books, 2012
Beautifully composed and rendered in black and white, the book documents
the rubble-strewn landscape of the devastated lot. Turning his lens
downward, Ribas' images of concrete shards form geometric abstractions
whose formal beauty masks the horror of their creation. Twisted rebar
sprouts out of the ground and fractured painted lines suggest a broken
order. Heavy stones and sharp slabs of cement jut upwards rendering the
landscape inhospitable and treacherous. Like most acts of urban renewal,
where the displaced quickly make way for the affluent, the destruction
of this space was a violent effort to control the space and to push
aside the unwanted. However, in the years since the displacement, there
is no evidence anything has been done to reclaim the land. The numerous
cracks and fissures have allowed weeds to take root and thrive, and
litter and graffiti have piled up. More fitting of a angry child than a
modern municipality, the brutal eviction of the families was an act of a
petulance and exasperation.
All images © Xavier Ribas and Bside Books, 2012
While the work offers no further contextual information about the actual
day, the city's decision or the families involved, it is nevertheless a
powerful document about a landscape wrought with history and absurdity.
The formally elegant images are infused with a feeling of anger and
bafflement. When installed in its exhibition form, images that otherwise
appear to be disparate fragments cohere into an informally knit
panorama. Ribas never shows this installation in the book, instead we
catch glimpses of the connections and continuities between the images.
Painted lines and concrete slabs continue into subsequent frames. Moving
through the book there is the sense that we're standing amidst the
rubble as our gaze panning out over the destruction that surrounds us.
All images © Xavier Ribas and Bside Books, 2012
All images © Xavier Ribas and Bside Books, 2012
The book contains almost no text save a brief statement about what
happened on a February morning in 2004 and a poignant quote from Walter
Benjamin at the end. A single color image of a stormy cloud-filled sky
occupies double page spread in the back of the book. The location's GPS
coordinates hover in the middle of the page and ground us in what is an
otherwise ethereal space. Following this image, a grid of images taken
from Google Earth reveals the lot and its surrounding area. From the
sky, there is only an empty lot and little hint of the devastation or
the lives shattered.
More properly titled Nomads, the work is actually part of the much larger project entitled Concrete Geographies.
Spanning several years and including several subseries, the larger
project explores a variety of different landscapes marked by violence,
history or politics. For example, Invisible Structures [2]
looks at the Mayan village of Panabaj that was tragically buried under a
mudslide that killed an estimated eight hundred people. In another two
series, Ceuta Border Fence and Melilla Border Fence, Ribas examines two
highly militarized border towns along the southern coast of Spain. The
book owes a clear debt to the equally politically charged and
conceptually minded landscapes of artists like Lewis Baltz and John
Gossage, or perhaps Anthony Hernandez, Roy Arden and Donovan Wylie.
All images © Xavier Ribas and Bside Books, 2012
Limited to 687 copies, each copy is signed by Ribas and is beautifully produced with luscious tri-tone reproductions. Like Ignacio Lopez's Agroperifèrics, another excellent book by Bside Books, Xavier Ribas' Concrete Geographies is a smart book about a politically charged landscape, the vagaries of land-use in the urban setting and their often-tragic consequences.
Please note: This review originally appears on photo-eye on March 4th, 2013. You can get the book here.
Limited to 687 copies, each copy is signed by Ribas and is beautifully produced with luscious tri-tone reproductions. Like Ignacio Lopez's Agroperifèrics, another excellent book by Bside Books, Xavier Ribas' Concrete Geographies is a smart book about a politically charged landscape, the vagaries of land-use in the urban setting and their often-tragic consequences.
Please note: This review originally appears on photo-eye on March 4th, 2013. You can get the book here.
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