Unanswered Signals
by Francisco Prieto Montesdeoca
portfolio special mention call 'Urbanautica Institute Awards 2025', 2025
Category: Representations of Space, Architecture, and Conflicts
Unanswered Signals explores the city as a system that continues to speak even when nobody is listening. These photographs show signs, instructions, warnings and promises that were created for human presence – yet now operate in a state of absence. What remains is a choreography of guidance without users, direction without destination and communication without response.
The series reflects a paradox of contemporary urban life: the more perfectly our infrastructures organize us, the more fragile our relation to them becomes. Reduced to architecture, light, trace and signal, the city appears not as scenery, but as an organism built from collective human thought. In this silence, the images ask: Who do these systems belong to when nobody is there to receive them? And what do they reveal about us, when the city keeps functioning – without us?