© XAVIER RIBAS - Publications
TRAFFICKING THE EARTH Published on the occasion of the exhibition Trafficking the Earth at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo [MAC], Santiago, Chile, 08.09.2017 – 12.11.2017. This publication is a 'folded exhibition' produced specially to distribute free among Chilean environmental activists, pressure groups, lawyers and school teachers in mining communities. Trafficking the Earth is a collaboration between photographers Xavier Ribas, Ignacio Acosta and an art historian, Louise Purbrick. Their collective research has documented the movement of mineral wealth of Chile into global markets and European landscapes. Nitrate and copper is their focus. The transformation of these natural resources into industrial materials draw desert and city, slag heap and country house, ruin and regeneration, landscape and archive, Chile and Britain, into the same circuit of capital. To see the inside the book and download the PDF go to the Traces of Nitrate project website.
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IT WOULD NEVER BE QUITE THE SAME AGAIN Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona 2017 Artist book published on the occasion of the exhibition 1989. After the Conversations of Algiers. Delirium and Truce, curated by Carles Guerra, that took place at Artium, Vitoria-Gasteiz, from the 11th of August to the 16th of October 2016, and at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, from the 11th of November 2016 to the 15th of January 2017. Developed as three large, detailed photographs and two found images, alongside artist’s texts and copies of original documentation, It Would Never Be Quite The Same Again weaves together a series of contested sites and acts of dissent. The works interrogate a number of events and documents construed as distant echoes in the recent history of Chile, Great Britain and Spain of the detonations in the late 19th and early 20th century nitrate fields of the Atacama Desert. The series is an appendix to my long term project Nitrate, presented in 2014 at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA], and conjures up a wide network of interconnected geographies and histories, of personal and collective memories on the distinctive political contexts of Spain and Chile around 1973, and on historical relationships between Chile and Great Britain – my country of residence since 2000 – which are at the heart of the Nitrate project. For both bodies of work, the Atacama Desert operates as a vanishing point. To see inside the book go to the Traces of Nitrate project website.
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NITRATE Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona [MACBA], Barcelona 2014
Like the dancing wooden table imagined by Karl Marx in Capital, all commodities are shape shifters. They appear to metamorphose. But nitrate materially changes. Its power as a substance and value as commodity lie in its capacity to change from material to immaterial state, to transform and to be transformative. Chilean nitrate is a sodium nitrate that, once processed, can be used as a fertiliser and to make explosives. It is the element nitrogen, which comprises eighty per cent of the earth’s atmosphere, in this compound form that can speed or shatter life. [Extract from Louise Purbrick's text in the exhibition catalogue] + NITRATE book awarded the Bronze Laus Prize 2015
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CONCRETE GEOGRAPHIES [NOMADS] Bside Books, Barcelona 2012 Published with the support of the University of Brighton On the 24th of February 2004 corporate developers Necso-Acciona sent heavy machinery to an industrial plot that they owned in the city of Barcelona, which was being occupied by some sixty Gypsy families. Over a few days two diggers drilled and lifted up the concrete floor of the site intimidating the Gypsies and finally pushing them out, leaving behind a contorted surface, like a horizontal wall, to protect the site and keep it empty. This method of dissuasion demonstrates the economic value of violence and destruction, even of one’s own property, in order to control space. The broken ground, the fissures and fragments of concrete slabs standing up like remnants of ancient Mayan stelae give testimony still today of this displacement.
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CONCRETE GEOGRAPHIES [CEUTA AND MELILLA BORDER FENCES] Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona 2012
As a response to their lack of visibility, these photographs intend to be statements towards a political cartography of the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla as the very edge of Europe. These two border fences are, perhaps, the contemporary public works that can best define, like monuments to inequality, the European landscape of the 21st century.
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RASTROS / TRACES / RASTRES Works by Javier Ayarza, A. Ferrer, Gert Jan Kocken, Ulrich Gebert, Matt Packer, Sven Johne and Lewis Ronald +
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GREENHOUSE "Past and future compress the present into a very thin layer in the landscape, barely visible. Greenhouse focuses on this landscape in transition; it is a journey along the gap between two times". ---- "Spanish artist Xavier Ribas's dual-channel video further explores how much the lens-based arts have changed since "New Topographics." Half of "Greenhouse" is a 20-minute video of a slow, rolling journey between two ends of a massive greenhouse construction site north of Amsterdam. The footage is as aloof as a video camera can be: unedited, and offering nary a pan, tilt, or zoom. The other half of "Greenhouse" is an interview with two landowners who sold their property to the developers. They recall all manner of context and history, recounting the reclamation of the land from the water and the Nazi invasion during World War II. While the artists of "New Topograhics" relied almost solely on the poetic mystery of images to make their statements, Ribas offers both a poem and a reason for why it was made." [Luke Strosnider / Rochester City Newspaper]
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SANTUARIO / SANCTUARY Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2005 Special Mention Photo España 2006 Book Prize
At the periphery, the city illuminates itself, negatively. Every image seized there, at the precipice where the urban compulsively extinguishes itself, is a story so concertinaed by sensation or absence that it fixes the eye profoundly into that image. Human life has been swept away, with magisterial cruelty or nonchalance, but the emanation projected by the empty zones of streets, highways, buildings, pivots on a kind of neural inkling within the membranes of the eye, an intimation of vision, that something may be resuscitated or restituted from the detritus that forms that void. In Europe, from Marseilles, to Berlin, to Rome, to London, the cities are engulfed: rendered into negligible corporate outposts, all images relentlessly pitted-out - except on their resistant peripheries. Europe survives as a caustic residue on those peripheries. [Extract from the accompanying text by Stephen Barber]. The book contains the following series: Flowers (1998-2000), Rooms (1997-2000), Sanctuary (2002), Thresholds (2001-2002), Stones (2000), Fires (2002), and a number of pictures from London, Marseille, Berlin and Rome. +
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XAVIER RIBAS [SUNDAYS] Best catalogue, Primavera Fotogràfica 2000
If you take a stroll one sunny Sunday morning through the peripheries of Barcelona you’ll come across a strange landscape. Between the motorways and housing blocks, the industrial states, the commercial centres and sports complexes; between the nature parks and the theme parks, at the edge of all this contemporary urbanization, you will find the marginal areas where folk flock together every weekend to spend their free time. The question is: Why do people turn these residual spaces into the centre of their leisure activity? +
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Restituciones. La Fotografía en Deuda con su Pasado. Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona, 2023. ISBN: 978-8498448368
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