-
Phantom brickworks
The rise and fall
of a development model
based on construction.
Bailén is a small town in southern Spain where, during the housing bubble in the early 2000s, a third of the country’s domestic housing-brick supply was produced. After the 2008 financial crash, two of the town’s three brickworks shut down – leaving dozens of abandoned factories behind. By walking through these ghostly ruins and photographing their strangely beautiful aesthetics, it is offered a reflection on the rise and fall of a development model based on construction. It is stated that, whilst the sole notion of ‘crisis’ is abstract and cannot be visualised, phantom brickworks function as antimetaphors because, instead of representing the crisis, they are the crisis.
Anti-monuments.
Diaphanous spaces reinforce my sense of solitude.
An object representative of an entire era.
Brickworks made of bricks. Bricks, bricks and yet more bricks.
The aftermath of the economic boom just like the ‘BOOM!’ of an actual bomb.
Will Spain entrust its future to the construction sector again?
Piles of bricks that were never sold.
Chaos and perpetual twilight.
Great pleasures, of freedom, exploration and discovery.
Time feels frozen, and the experience is priceless.
An apocalyptic movie set.
The future is far from promising.
The sublime: photographs function as an emotional testimony.
A world of workers and their broken aspirations.
The ‘gold bullion’.
Down to earth. The dream soon turned into a nightmare.
Brick on canvas.
