Images of abandoned places.
History, danger, time, fear, disgusts, memories, contempt, abandonment. These are some of the thoughts that might reach our head when we see the dozens of deserted structures that are in our surroundings. Curiosity and intrigue it’s what I perceive when I observe this places.
Curiosity motivated me to en
ter these places that we normally tend to avoid, or that we merely don’t notice their existence. Surely I risked my well being in more than one occasion, just to have the chance, the opportunity of documenting what I believed these locations represented.
It turned into a sort of obsession. I constantly found myself scouting and making a list of all the places that seemed abandoned. If I saw it while driving, or if somebody mentioned a location, it would make my list. I dedicated a good amount of my time patrolling the surroundings of each and every one of the locations, before venturing into them. I’d searched for the best entry point and escape route. Once at the location, just right before entering, I waited for the right moment to enter, until the fewest people were in the nearby areas, and that’s when I made my move. You could consider that I was planning a bank heist.
But all that left my mind once I entered these structures. I could only appreciate the architectural features. The streaks of light orchestrated by holes, doors, windows and the puddles of leaked water. The sepulchral silence, which confronted you once inside the building, was only disrupted by droplets of water and the sound of the creatures that now inhabit these places. The smell of decay, presented at you by the combination of rust, dust and rot; which signaled nature’s reclamation process.
I took all of these details into account, only to commence to envision how these locations were at their peak. To think on all the lives, the events, the stories these characters of steel, wood and concrete have witnessed and been part of. But after experiencing the smells, the sounds, the sights and imagining what once was, at the end of the day I could only, just barely, come into terms whit two particular notions. The first was why the current state of abandonment of this locations, why the negligence and the lack of initiative care, and maintenance and reuse; allowing, with some exceptions, the unnecessary demolition and substitution of these structures.
And secondly, that these represent the unavoidable route of human presence, and the precognition in which all that it’s made by man will reach once humanity ceases to exist in this planet. In short one could say that with this project, not only we see our recent past, but also our inevitable future.