In the southern province of Guangdong, one can drive for hours along
numerous highways that reveal a virtually unbroken landscape of factories and workers’ dormitories.[1]
numerous highways that reveal a virtually unbroken landscape of factories and workers’ dormitories.[1]
--- Edward Burtynsky
Industrial land as an undefined space made up of concrete, asphalt, container boxes and factories. The factories are unknown spaces that produce in an unknown land. Machinery can be heard and smelt. And office districts with its offices as boxes placed on top of each other, with the computer as a virtual space. Do these undefined spaces contain a heartbeat, do they breath, do they contain a soul? Or are they artificial; manufactured? Is this the reality of a living space?
I’m interested in the spaces dedicated to the capitalistic system: spaces belonging to industrialisation and bureaucracy. People are living in a world of production: making products, moving them, buying them and putting them into their homes. People live in a produced environment, whether they are at work or at home. The industrial space is interwoven with living space.
The growth of the industrial districts in Asia is at a cost of the Western-European industrial space. Especially China is creating new, fast industrial cities like Xiamen city, Dongguan and Zhejiang. Here in Western Europe the industrial spaces are becoming empty, hollow and only contain traces of the glory of production. They are fallow, forgotten and becoming unknown spaces. They must move, are torn down or being converted to office space. Offices communicate with the speed of light with the new industrial countries in the East. The fast development of technology makes it possible for us to prosume, reproduce and spread information in seconds. We are involved in the Internet, the extension of our world. We are losing the boundary between reality and fiction, between industrialisation and life.
In my work I want to observe and get in contact with these unknown spaces. Examine them as spaces where people move in, breath in, live in. I want to sense them, smell them, isolate them, feel the boundaries, concentrate on them and enter into them; experience them. Photography is used as a vision of the real spaces, my inspiration. I would like to explore the unknown spaces by means of the limits and unlimits of drawing. By drawing them I want to investigate my real observation and my imaginary one and recover the tension between what is reality and what is fictional.
I want to dismantle the machinery and production lines, stop them and search for something that is not productive or functional. Crack the system. Find out whether they have a spirit; whether they have a soul. Creating my own industrial reality.
I want to dismantle the machinery and production lines, stop them and search for something that is not productive or functional. Crack the system. Find out whether they have a spirit; whether they have a soul. Creating my own industrial reality.
