Throughout my artistic personal career, my projects have explored housing not so much as a collective phenomenon but rather in relation to the territory or the urban context, understood as a space for the exception, always conditioned by some kind of latency, transition or abandonment. Public housing would therefore serve very specific interests that, outwardly, escape the territories where my gaze has felt attracted and even comfortable.
Typologically, I have felt attracted by the “house” in its objectual condition, from its reiteration and seriation, as it already happened in the series “Twentysix (abandoned) gasoline stations”. In 2021 the magazine AV1 published the series “Collecting Homes” in dialogue with other somewhat analogous series such as “Typologies” by Bruno Fontana or “Free Architecture” by Adam Wiseman. However, that same article already put on the table other views that penetrate into the domestic sphere, into the interior of the dwelling, where the experience of collective dwelling really takes place: Todd Hido’s work “House Hunting” illuminates the gloom of the anodyne American suburban spaces by illuminating the inhabited interior and, for their part, Bogdan Girbovan’s “10/1” and Michael Wolf’s “100x100” series delve into the relationship between the repetitive collective domestic space and the way in which the inhabitant and his objects shape and qualify it.
It is surely in this introverted territory where the reflection of contemporary photography is forged in relation to collective habitation, which in turn reflects a socioeconomic palpitation derived, on the one hand, from the radical experience of the worldwide confinement of the Covid-19 pandemic and, on the other, the unavoidable crisis of public housing as a political project, unable to respond in many countries to the housing urgency strained by real estate speculation and, consequently, by the high prices of sale and rent. In both cases, society has rediscovered a need that goes beyond the right to decent housing. It is in the home where the person, the individual and his immediate family nucleus, builds his genuine identity, the sphere of his intimacy. The house counts, I insist, not only at a satisfactory level of a basic need —for protection or shelter— but as a configurator of that which makes us truly individuals who then
project that experience from the private to the public and collective, to the social.
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Cover image: Weissenhof-Siedlung, 2013. Le Corbusier, Stuttgart, 1927
1 “Documentos dobles”, AV Monografías, nº 237, 2021, p. 8.