Ciudades de juguete [Toy Cities] (2005)
Digital collage using negatives on dibond
84 x 200 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2005.107.1
In Ciudades de juguete [Toy Cities], Greta Alfaro creates a collage with overlapping photos combining different dwellings of Bilbao and Valencia, the two cities where she was living at that time. The strategy consisted of choosing dilapidated buildings, stark structures whose interiors were exposed to the elements, creating open abodes. The outcome is very similar to hybrid and dystopian architecture, suspended in the void. A human hive hanging in nothingness, whose shape is reminiscent of a doll’s house.
The collage produced by adding and pairing different realities – arranged in series – to construct a single entity, could be perceived as a reflection on our contemporary cities, on their possibilities to be reshaped and interact, on their twilight and their death.
It is thus a reflection based on the new urban needs where the variety of lifestyles, along with the different concept of ‘habitat’, create a sense of foreboding that is as unsettling as paradoxical.
Greta Alfaro (Pamplona, 1977) graduated in Fine Arts from the Polytechnique University of Valencia in 2001, and completed a Master’s Degree in Photography at the Royal College of Art in London. Her work draws on different media – video, photography, installation and collage –, often from a site-specific approach, and through which she explores identity issues. Her works establishes a thought-provoking dialogue between scenes of intense realism, which are presented unfiltered, and other images that appeal to clearly dreamlike aesthetics.