Espacios industriales (composición) [Industrial Spaces (Composition)] (2014)
Digital photography
103.5 × 153 cm
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 289
Espacios industriales [Industrial Spaces] is part of a meticulous series entitled ‘Espacios de trabajo’ [Work Spaces]. For months, Iñigo Garatu conducted a near archaeological exploration as he literally combed the main industrial areas of the Basque Country. That immersion – in the mindset of a steelmaking and machining setting – served to recover those remains in a gesture that immortalises the decadency and metamorphosis process of the industrial model, which was the hallmark of much of Bizkaia for years.
With this exhaustive compilation of industrial dinosaurs, Iñigo Garatu rehashes the memory of its historical heyday, which was key to its very identity until a few years ago and which, now, is rushing towards its total disappearance. As if recorded by a notary public working against the clock, the spaces and architectures that Garatu portrays are evocative shapes, fossils of a collection that aspires to be an epitaph and memory of the Basque territory.