Heterotopia; industrial pushpins of a temporary heterotopia
by Anna Fontanet Castillo
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2024', 2024
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
Review by URBANAUTICA
"Industrial Pushpins of a Temporary Heterotopia" by Anna Fontanet Castillo is a photographic project that reactivates Barcelona’s industrial ghosts, transforming the surviving chimneys of Poblenou into temporal devices that challenge our understanding of progress, memory, and urban identity. These isolated structures—remnants of more than a thousand factories built between 1840 and 1950—now rise like accidental monuments across a landscape that has largely erased the material conditions of its own industrial revolution. Once embedded in a dense manufacturing network, the 28 chimneys preserved in Poblenou endure mostly because demolishing them is too costly.
Fontanet Castillo frames these chimneys as heterotopias in the Foucauldian sense—other spaces that do not fully belong to the present yet persist within it, resisting total assimilation into Barcelona’s normalized, polished urbanity. Observing these heterotopias means acknowledging the cracks in the narrative of contemporary progress, spaces where time folds and the past insists on being seen. In this sense, the chimneys operate as urban ruins, and ruins—like time machines—carry the past into the present, allowing us to inhabit history rather than drift rootlessly in a perpetual now. A present without a past, after all, is like a tree without roots: sooner or later, it loses its leaves. Human beings dwell through places; only uprooted individuals roll like tumbleweeds in the wind.
The chimneys thus stand not only as markers of industrial labor and of the generations whose lives sustained the city, but also as monuments to the transience of progress itself. What remains of the factories is the material residue of a lost world, the capitalist manufacturing engine that once propelled Barcelona forward. Those factories were ships of hope; now their chimneys rise like masts stranded in another era. That Barcelona no longer exists, yet it survives in memory and in the ruins rescued—intentionally or not—from oblivion.
The project’s methodology deepens this temporal reflection. Photographing the same 15 chimneys first in 2019–20, then again across the four seasons of 2023–24, Fontanet Castillo creates layered images where time overlaps and repeats. The chimneys remain constant, statuesque, while everything around them shifts—the light, the vegetation, the evolving urban fabric. These photographs welcome repetition, cycle, and return; they blur into the uncertain territory of memory, which is never fixed. They remind us that everything changes, yet traces endure. Architecture becomes sedimented time, a measure against the fleeting contingencies of the present. And through these traces we confront the perennial questions that orient human existence: where we come from, from whom we descend, and why we continue to move through the landscapes we inherit.