In Sub/urbia

(O cuando el suburbio se rebela contra la utopía)

Comisario: Paco Barragán

25.05.2023 – 29.07.2023

Full disclosure: I love In Suburbia by Pet Shop Boys. As a teenager I used to sing it to myself, even out loud! The funny thing now is that it was not until some months ago that I noticed the beginning of the song: Suburbia/Where the suburbs met utopia…  (And every time I hear the word utopia, my dear reader, I can’t but stand up and render the military salute!)

Back then I was fully immersed in the Italian Renaissance and its two extraordinary centuries of overwhelming artistic predomiance. But why Italy and not France or Spain? According to Jacob Burckhardt, Fernand Braudel and Michael Baxandall, the culture of city-states like Florence and Venice was far superior as it boasted an advanced and sophisticated material culture where the new economy of money reigned, stimulating the collecting habits of the new urban mercantile classes. 

And if we mix the Renaissance city with the concept of ‘global city’ coined by Dutch sociologist Saskia Sassen—while the catchy Pet Shop Boys chorus resonates in the background—then the narrative of urbia and suburbia, as privileged spaces that define the fate of the contemporary subject in the 21^st-century, acquires cutting charm. We even find a certain holistic sense to it: from the advent of the Renaissance city we ended up in today’s smart cities!

Suburbia/Where the suburbs met utopia—and suddenly I find myself wondering: is the city still that place of promise and hope? What happened to the suburbs and its residential areas where the well-off middle classes took their refuge in order to escape downtown’s traffic, crime and polution? Does the city or the suburbs still represent the materialization of the ‘60s utopia?

The exhibition In Sub/urbia (Or when Suburbia crashed Utopia) brings together a group of esteemed inter/national artists whose photographic research of the different urban typologies offers critical, poetic and even oneiric visions: from the intimate and pictorial interior spaces by Alexandra Ranner and José Manuel Ballester to the spaces of cult by Darren Siwes and Chus García-Fraile; from Sergio Belinchón’s anodyne beach urbanizations to undreamt of parking garages and bridges by Igor Mishiev and Aitor Ortiz; and finally from Martin Liebscher and Brad Temkin’s scaffoldings and rooftop terraces, Rosemary Laing’s NASA hangars to the aseptic non-spaces by Íñigo Lasheras.

The exhibit In Sub/urbia proposes at the same time an investigation into the different photographic aesthetics and languages encompassing staged photography (Rosemary Laing), digitally manipulated photography (García-Fraile, Mishiev, Ballester, Ortiz), documentary photography with a conceptual bend (Belinchón, Temkin, Lasheras) and photos that are either the result of using small architectural models (Ranner) or subjected to the manipulation of exposure time (Siwes, Liebscher).

And yet I keep asking myself: has suburbia finally met utopia?

EXPOSICIÓN FONDO DE GALERÍA

BRAD TEMKIN

EXPOSICIÓN FONDO DE GALERÍA

PAISAJES ARTIFICIALES

BEATRIZ ROMERO · LOLA GUERRERA · LORETO DAUDÉN

Beatriz Romero

Lola Guerrera

Loreto Daudén