The industrial past of Barcelona, barely perceptible in the city's physiognomy, is reduced to anecdotal constructions scattered across the urban fabric, most of them in the form of isolated and decontextualized chimneys. Between 1840 and 1950, more than a thousand factories were built in Barcelona. In Poblenou alone, there were up to 200, making it the city's main industrial hub.
Most of the industrial buildings from this era have only preserved the chimneys, without the factory buildings that once housed them. In the Poblenou neighborhood, 28 have been preserved; the reason is the high cost of demolishing them, but because structurally they have a small base compared to their height, they occupy little surface area, facilitating construction on urbanizable land and avoiding demolition, even though they are not yet listed as heritage.
Given this reality, I am left with a series of "questions-reflections" if we take into account the importance, in the economic realm, that the industrial past represented in Catalonia and that is now represented in the urban landscape as mere pins on the map of the Capital of this region.
What does the legacy of the industrial revolution represent today in Barcelona, in Catalonia? In the world? What space, social, and economic weight does the industrial past have in our cities?
Does architectural heritage have gender?
How is the significance of its beginnings reflected in our landscape?
Does constant evolution erase history? Does it rewrite it? Does it reinterpret it?
Is evolution growth? Is it amnesia, manipulation of the past or of a people's vital memory? Is it opening doors to new possibilities for living and being in the urban, vital, social, and economic space?
Is growth expansion?
Is expansion transformation?
Is transformation change?
Is change constant? Cyclical? Evolutionary? Involutive?
Is constancy repetitive?
If repetition defines a period, and a period is contained within a span of time, and this repeats cyclically, does each stage of history become part of a loop?
The process of creating this work takes place in a first phase between 2019 and 2020. During this period, I photographed 15 of the 28 chimneys that remain in Poblenou. The main goal was to find a point of view that framed them in their new urban context, thus giving relevance to their decontextualization, where most of the time there is no other trace of the industrial past. The images highlight different spaces-times, through architecture, that have little to say to each other but are, at the same time, the leitmotif of the current landscape and urbanism. In other words, an exercise in representing a temporal heterotopia, using the chimneys as temporary transporters to an industrial past. Understanding heterotopia from Michel Foucault's analysis as a counter-space, a space that does not exist, has no place, but endures and takes form in our imagination thanks to elements that resist being completely destroyed.
The temporal heterotopia was incomplete in a single image, as time varies in each time unit, and photography freezes moments. The contrast of industrial architectural elements with modern architecture that houses cultural centers, educational institutions, housing, and offices was not enough; time needed to be contained in more moments to close a cycle. For this reason, I decide to return 4 years later to photograph the 15 chimneys during the four seasons of the year, starting in the summer of 2023 and closing the cycle in the spring of 2024. Returning to photograph these temporal spaces again allows the viewer to appreciate the chimneys as a constant element in the photograph. The result is images that compose overlapping moments, with an initial temporal jump of 4 years and 3 more of 2-3 months each.
The captures of each chimney change minimally in point of view, but the timing of the sun is respected between the golden and blue hours. The environment changes according to the natural evolution of its vegetation and the human transformation of the urban realm.
The project includes a one-minute video made up of all 75 photographs taken of the 15 chimneys and a photographic series consisting of 15 images, one for each chimney in Poblenou covered by the project, resulting from the overlap of 5 different moments collected in two phases:
Phase 1 between autumn/winter 2019-20,
Phase 2 consists of the same 15 shots in the summer and autumn of 2023, winter 23/24, and spring 2024. (Here, the passage of time is marked by the astronomical seasons).