Concrete Geographies (Nomads)
Xavier Ribas
BSide Books
English and Spanish
Hardcover with Softcover Fanzine
Edition 174 of 687 Signed
84 pages
240 x 300 mm
2012
ISBN 9788461572298
On the 24th of February 2004, heavy machinery entered an empty industrial plot in Barcelona occupied by some sixty Roma families. Over a few days two diggers drilled and lifted up the concrete floor of the site, intimidating the Roma and finally pushing them out. They left behind a contorted surface, like a horizontal wall, to protect the site and keep it empty. This method of dissuasion demonstrates the economic value of violence and destruction in order to control space. The broken ground, the fissures and fragments of concrete slabs standing up like remnants of ancient Mayan stelae give testimony, still today, of this displacement.
About the Artist
Xavier Ribas is a photographer, lecturer at the University of Brighton, and associate lecturer at the Universitat Politècnica de València. He studied Social Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and Documentary Photography at the Newport School of Art and Design. His photographic work investigates contested sites and histories, and geographies of abandonment. His recent works take the form of large photographic grids, often including text, archive materials and moving image as multiple, composite forms of examining temporary settlements, sites of corporate development and exclusion, border territories, and geographies of extraction.
xavierribas.com
About the Publisher
Bside Books (Self Produced & Limited Editions) is an independent editorial project whose philosophy is to be a platform for the self-production of limited editions and books related to urban mobility and the interpretation of the territory produced and transformed by these movements. Created by Carlos Albalá & Ignasi López, Bside Books explores different and carefully curated ways of materialising the work of artists in the world of printed publication.
bsidebooks.bigcartel.com
Further Reading
(Source https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/publications/nomads)
