© Xavier Ribas - PUBLICATIONS - PDF
XAVIER RIBAS
Universidad de Salamanca, Salamanca 1998.
ISBN 84-7481-988-1
Texts by Xavier Ribas and Ramón Esparza.
Spanish and English. 65 pages (soft bound).
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?
(Extract from the accompanying text by Xavier Ribas)
Download PDF complete text English version
Download PDF complete text Spanish version
SANCTUARY
Editorial Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, 2005.
ISBN 84-252-2040-8
Text by Stephen Barber.
English/Spanish. 136 pages (hard bound)
This book can be ordered directly from Editorial Gustavo Gili: http://www.ggili.com/
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)
Download PDF complete text English version
Download PDF complete text Spanish version
The book contains the following series: Flowers (1998-2000), Rooms (1997-2000), Sanctuary (2002), Thresholds (2001-2002), Stones (2000), Fires (2002), plus a selection of pictures from London, Marseille, Berlin and Rome.
RASTROS / TRACES
An exhibition curated by Xavier Ribas
Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca / Fundació Fotocolectania, Salamanca / Barcelona, 2009
ISBN: 978-84-7800-266-5
Texts by Iain Sinclair and Xavier Ribas
English/Spanish/Catalan, 166 pages (hard bound)
Works by Javier Ayarza, A. Ferrer, Gert Jan Kocken, Ulrich Gebert, Matt Packer, Sven Johne and Lewis Ronald
Download PDF text by Xavier Ribas (English)
Download PDF text by Xavier Ribas (Spanish)
Link to Iain Sinclair's text in London Review of Books
Download PDF text byIain Sinclair (Spanish)
GREENHOUSE. A DVD published by Paradox
"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
PHOTO ART: PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE 21st CENTURY
Aperture, 2008
520 four-color and 45 black-and-white images. 512 Pages, 8.25" x 10.375"
ISBN: 978-1-59711-062-4
As digital technologies and the homogenization of trends continue to impact photo graphy, there are those artists who rise above the fray, producing compelling work that causes a commotion. Photo Art: Photography in the 21st Century features the latest, greatest, and newly up-and-coming artists responsible for this furor. A com pendium of more than 120 image-makers from around the globe, Photo Art reads like an international art fair between covers.
This luscious compendium showcases the work of artists to watch now and in the future: from established figures such as Richard Billingham, Takashi Homma, and Luc Delahaye to representatives of the newest generation: Beate Gütschow, Barbara Probst, and Roe Etheridge. Each artist’s work is showcased in a generous four-page spread; many of the layouts are enriched by installation views, book layouts, and shots of art ists’ websites.
Texts by sixteen of the world’s top international curators and theorists, along with a glossary of the most important technical and theoretical terms, elevate this breathtak ing volume beyond the realm of the coffee-table book.
BLINK! 100 PHOTOGRAPHERS 10 CURATORS. 10 WRITERS
Phaidon Press, London 2002.
ISBN: 0-7148-4199-4
English. 440 pages (hard bound)
BLINK presents the work of 100 of the world's most exciting contemporary photographers, selected by 10 internationally acclaimed critics, curators and creative directors. An exhibition in a book, BLINK. showcases up-and-coming talent from all parts of the world, enabling the reader to stay one step ahead of emerging trends in the fast-changing world of photography.
It serves as a unique reference tool for photographers, artists, designers and all those interested in contemporary culture and the image. BLINK. further provides a rare insight into the deliberations of an esteemed, international panel of selectors: the 'experts' making key decisions about the future of photography.
This book can be ordered directly from Phaidon: www.phaidon.com
Alternatively from: www.schaden.com
NATURE AS ARTIFICE. NEW DUTCH LANDSCAPE IN PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEO ART
Hardback, Illustrated (colour and b/w), 288 pages, Size: 27 x 27 cm
Nai Publishers, Amsterdam 2008
English edition, ISBN 978-90-5662-028-8
Around the world, the notion of 'the Dutch landscape' still evokes an image that is strongly influenced by the painterly tradition of unspoilt and idyllic farmland. However, like many other countries, the Netherlands has altered radically over the last century. Agriculture is being supplanted by suburbs, infrastructure for the sake of mobility, and recreation. The Netherlands currently enjoys international renown for its acuity in planning and radically high-tech methods used to control and mould the landscape and nature: water management, engineering technologies for spraying pancake-like layers of sand to drastically reshape or actually create land and computer-controlled horticulture in greenhouses. Since the 1980s, a number of outstanding landscape photographers and video artists have been taking this artificial character of the Dutch landscape and nature as their creative point of departure. Their works of art capture motorways, railways and the recently created landscape of symmetrical polders, glasshouses, business parks and suburban residential districts. At the same time they are searching for a new aesthetic that is no longer based on that of bucolic Old Master paintings. Several of these photographers and artists are already establishing a reputation in the Netherlands and abroad. Nature as Artifice brings them together for the first time, lending their work greater visibility abroad, positioning it in the context of international developments in contemporary art and photography, and simultaneously contributing to new perceptions of the Dutch landscape.
Includes work by Hans Aarsman, Jannes Linders, Wout Berger, Henze Boekhout, Edwin Zwakman, Theo Baart, Cary Markerink, Hans van der Meer, Marnix Goossens, Driessens/Verstappen, Hans Werlemann, Gert Jan Kocken, Bas Princen, Gábor Ösz, Gerco de Ruijter, Frank van der Salm, Xavier Ribas and Arnoud Holleman.
Extract of Xavier Ribas pages in the book
LOCAL. THE END OF GLOBALISATION
An exhibition curated by Paul Wombell
ISBN No. 9788445130001
124 pages. Spanish/English
Hidden within photographic history and recent concerns in contemporary photography is geography. The geography of place, location and community. Today these issues are rarely seen as important, because globalisation is king. Globalisation has placed a blanket over the world, so hiding the importance of where we life and who we live with. Recently some writers have suggested that globalisation is in decline, and with the recent rise of regionalism and religion the existing world order will change. This new world order will be based on a more localised view of the world. All the 11 photographers in the exhibition engage in some way with a particular place or community of people. There is an intimacy in the way they engage with their subject that as developed over time, sometimes over many years: you could call this 'slow photography'. Consciously or unconsciously these photographers place location quite centrally in their work. They use their cameras to define community both in a conventional and unconventional ways. Community can be defined sometimes by a small group of friends, people living in village, town or sexuality and ethnicity. The photographers have their own different photographic practices that ranges across documentary, landscape, studio, commercial and fine art photography. When you start to recognise that location and community is central to the work of many contemporary photographers their work begins to look different, and so does the world. Photography may be the medium of location.
List of photographers in the exhibition: Hans Aaarsman (Holland), Shelby Lee Adams (US), Boris Mikhailov (Ukraine), Hashem El Madani (Lebanon), Tom Hunter (UK), Jem Southam (UK), Xavier Ribas (Spain), Li Tianbing (China). Hellen Van Meene (Holland), Massimo Vitali (Italy), Karlheinz Weinberger (Switzerland).
DEL PAISAJE RECIENTE [De la imagen al territorio]
Fundación ICO, Madrid, 2006.
ISBN 13:978-84-934684-2-2
Texts by Horacio Fernández and Javier Chavarría. Includes a selection of historical and
contemporary texts concerning the landscape (some texts are edited versions. Selection by Catarina Pestana).
Spanish. 232 pages (soft bound).
This book is a catalogue of the exhibition at the Fundación ICO produced in collaboration with PhotoEspaña 2006. Artists include: Jesús Abad, Nobuo Asada, Uta Barth, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Angela Detanico & Rafael Laín, Dan Graham, Maiko Haruki, Tomoki Imai, Xavier Ribas, Misha de Ridder, Lars Tunbjörg and Tomoko Yoneda.
http://www.phedigital.com/
DES ESPÈCES d’ESPACES
VOX/Tinglado 2 Centre d’Art Contemporani, Tarragona, 2003.
ISBN 2-9801608-9-X
Texts by Chanrtal Grande and Marie-Josée Jean.
French/Catalan/English. 86 pages (soft bound).
Catalogue of the exhibition at the Space VOX (Montreal) and Tinglado 2 (Tarragona) curated by Chantal Grande and Marie-Josée Jean. Artists include: Claire Savoie, Xavier Ribas, Perejaume, Alain Paiement, Anna Ferrer, Jordi Colomer, Nicolas Baier and Jocelyne Alloucherie.
Link to Voxphoto page of the publication or download Pdf
Link to Voxphoto page of the exhibition