IN_DEPENDENCIES - Art Photography Awards 2019
Project info

PROJECT DESCRIPTION by Miguel Angel Garcia

Europe is a space made up of nations that have or have had problems in their territories with the issue of independence (Ireland, Brittany, Basque Country, Flanders, Catalonia, etc ...) Almost 70% of EU citizens live in territories where the issue of independence has been (or is) a problem. However, from my point of view, the concerns of the citizens of the 21st century remain the basic dependencies (heat, energy, light, communications, privacy). To visualize this hypothesis, the basic idea has been to investigate which elements on the roofs told us about the most common "dependencies" in each city, which element was the most frequent, and therefore, the one that best defined the idiosyncrasy, the way of life, of the inhabitants of that city, taking photographs of the roofs of the historic city center as the most characteristic place of each of the capitals. Those elements (chimneys, skylights, solar panels, ...) I have highlighted them in red to show the map of the dependencies of each European capital: Paris (chimneys), London (skylights), Prague (mansards)...

The photos have always been taken from significant watchtowers of each city (St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Pompidou Center in Paris, Acropolis in Athens, ..). The global image is Europe # 1 which is a summary image (collage) of all the "dependencies" of the 28 capitals of the European Union: a kind of "instantaneous needs" of common space such as Europe but differentiated by particular characteristics. Unity and diversity in the same image: The whole build a "city" that does not exist in reality, it is the "city" of common needs, which brings us together and, at the same time, differentiates us. A space of tolerance, respect, and diversity.

(The image EUROPE 2 it is the result of 4 years of work and traveled more than 60,000 kilometers through the 28 countries of the European Union.)

COMMENT by Joan Fontcuberta
Curator of ‘Photography 2.0’ exhibition - PhotoEspaña '14

Miguel Ángel García defines his series IN_DEPENDENCIES as an analysis of the yearning for independence, privacy and personal identity among the citizens of the European Union.

In theory, housing represents the sphere of privacy in face of the common and all-encompassing space of the city. García focuses on what he considers to be the epidermis of the buildings, the rooftops, which is where the dependencies of its inhabitants are marked: water, light, heat, energy, communications, etc. These dependencies avail the independence that is in which it is at stake and allude to the dialect between difference and fusion.

That is to say, the project expresses on a political level, the illusory character of the independence, and on a photographic level the urgency of articulating the landscape not just as a naive depiction of nature, but as an attitude of consciousness. If photography describes, and post-photography conceptualizes, IN-DEPENDENCIES uses a pseudo-documentary strategy alongside political, economic and cultural devises, in which the place (the city) becomes the landscape"