Xavier Ribas - Photographer

Incidents. Installation grid

Telefónica Foundation commissioned 8 photographers to work in Distrito C, the future site of the company's new corporate headquarters in Madrid. This work was produced in December 2005 while the site was still under construction.
Distrito C. 8 Visiones (see bellow) was presented as a book and exhibition in Madrid in September 2007, feautirng all the commissions work by Sergio Belinchón, Bleda y Rosa, Jordi Bernadó, Manel Esclusa, Aitor Ortíz, Xavier Ribas, Montserrat Soto and Valentín Vallhonrat.

"In the 5th C, Rome was the size of a village, but the palaces of its emperors were still inhabitable"
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1917)

Incidents is inspired by the nine photographs ‘How to dial a telephone number. Photographic instructions’ (see below) from the collection of the Telefónica Foundation, made by Alfonso in 1926 (the methodology and the spirit is also that of John Gossage). The photographic image atempts to work, in Alfonso's as in here, like an instructions manual of a new technological artifact destined to change the everyday habits, even though this set of instructions can not possibly help us understand the logic of its functioning, or its aspirations.

With the pasage of time, technological artifacts seem to have dematerialised, as if it were impossible to fix the objects with the echo of their fabrication. Cotemporary technological artifacts sit like outside of time, or their time doesn’t seem to coincide with our biological time. In the past, technological artifacts had an effect in social life through their actual familiarization in the everyday. Now, on the contrary, they are only assimilated as ruins: when we get the grips with them they are already obsolete. The feeling is that we can not catch up with technology, that we can only assimilate it as a relic: technological artifacts get scrappet while still new.

Distrito C: What are the components of this new technological apparatus, a corporate campus, in construction? What is it made of this "future of work", as the company's corporate literature puts it? And, what is it that gets displaced, or eliminated, in terms of the past, but also of possible futures?

I propose to make an archaeology of the building site. A child, my nine year old son (indeed, we are talking about his future here), will pick up fragments of materials and objects found in the building site and we will photograph them on location. These objects could either be from what is being displaded, what was here in the building site before the works began, as well as fragments of what the building itself is made of, leftovers and residues of its fabrication. In some way, the child makes a reconaissance of the future that is being put forward for him as a productive individual.

Incidents is about a suspended space and time. 'Before' and 'after' overlap eachother, past of the place and future of the building: What will be here when this building will eventually collapse? The images try to make visible this state of suspension, they attempt to give it a form through the connexion of these apparently random objects, found as if by accident. In the background, the half built structures refer to the future building, just like a ruin refers to the building that has already collapsed. Displacement, construction and ruin, intermingled, incomprehensible.

(I would like to acknowledge the suggestions made by Alberto Martín, Txema Onzain and Domi Mora.)

Text in Spanish (Pdf)

50 images | prev | next

Installation picture of Incidents at the Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, Sept 2007

Ocho Visiones. Distrito C. Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2007. ISBN 978-84-89884-74-8

Download PDF of the publication