Alfonso Batalla’s Landscape Under Construction Photos Look At Memory And Reality, Past And Present

moray mair | Photography | October 16, 2012

Alfonso Batalla‘s ‘Landscape Under Construction’ photo series are about the present and the past, memory and reality and the fragile nature of time. The concept is quite straight forward, he found vacant abandoned spaces and filled them with new objects, a juxtaposition that serves to heighten the difference between past and present, our perception of reality and the new and old such as a carousel in an abandoned paper factory, a pinball machine in an old coal mine or an ATM in the side of an old stone cottage.

Here’s what Batalla has to say about the series:

In this work a new, ordinary, shiny element many times related to our childhood is digitally inserted in a powerful decaying architectural environment. This has something to do with hegel/heideger philosophical concepts. in a simple explication we, human beings, live usually in a ‘being there’ status. we are happy, or sad, with our jobs, properties, family…from time to time we feel a kind of distress, anguish, and we start to realize what we are. we might call this condition ‘being oneself’.

In this work, decaying architecture represents the truth about ourselves while the intruding element, be it the dolphin, merry go round, car, sofa, pinball or whatever, represents what we see of reality when we are just being there. Both true reality and beauty are in the decay. curiously, this work has its own life. nowadays, with the deep recession that isolates mostly southern europe I am starting to see that the dolphin is more real and the abandoned building more fake, so possibly the world is not so bad as we see it now.

Via Design Boom