Edgar Martins’ records the insides of some of Europe's oldest hydropower stations. No more than half a dozen people, including specialists and cleaning and security staff, run places which, in some cases, were intended to house up to 250 workers just fifty years ago. At each dam, the automating of the machines has alienated the concrete and immediate power by which reality is governed and concentrated the control of a complex hydroelectric system in a distant centre, lending consistency to the possibility of fictionalising the controlling of man by machines which he himself created. What can now be considered as false expectations of the future, or broken promises, stems from projects that were conceived when man and machine formed part of the same future, when the particular submitted to the universal. The artist alludes to the paradox of this impossibility and his images are a testimony of the link that has been broken.
