Paisajes y vistas de la ciudad abortada [Landscapes and views of the aborted city]

In ‘Timeless City’, at the Factoría Cultural de Avilés, the Avilés-born Carlos Suárez continues his tireless denunciation of anti-urbanism as a pathology derived from capitalist speculation.

For years now, Carlos Suárez (Avilés, 1969) has been engaged in a fertile and many-sided effort to interpret, from strongly critical positions, the landscape built by human hands. Coherent, stubborn and ever richer, his work draws on photography, printmaking, installation and written documentation to chart the growing alienation of human beings from the territory we inhabit. Or that we claim, pretend, use as a pretext and ultimately fail to inhabit. Timeless City, the intervention Suárez has just opened in the central space of the Factoría Cultural de Avilés, persists in that work of demolishing a certain concept of (non-)urbanism that has proliferated under speculative greed, deforming or condemning to necrosis a territory that is no longer natural, yet has not managed to become a country or a polis either: a place inhabited by a human community, in inner and outer organic harmony, with itself and with the environment it belongs to.

Using the aesthetic codes of the landscape genre, Carlos Suárez documents some of these ruined places, combining photographic and graphic images in diptychs made up of a photographed landscape and a text. Sometimes the text is concentrated in the flash of a single word (a resounding No beneath a road under construction that cuts through a forest) or in the irony of a slogan that subverts the advertising discourse of estate agents (wonderful place beside a flooded landscape); at other times it extends to a literary fragment, taking quotations from the fundamental manifestos of Situationist urbanism, such as the ‘Programme élémentaire du bureau d’urbanisme unitaire’ by Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem (1961) or the ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ by Gilles Ivain (1958). From these elements, rather than as an exhibition of a series of pieces, Suárez has conceived Timeless City as a single piece, an intervention adapted to the space of the Factoría.

From no memory to no time

In a way, this work is the complementary vision to his 2013 exhibition No memory. Cities in the world. On that occasion Suárez showed the coexistence of ruin with our urban landscapes: a ruin unnoticed by almost all their inhabitants, yet always present as a vector towards the past (the memory of the place) and a vector towards the future (the threat and memento of the destruction or razing of the place as a warning). In any case, that debris, rubble and those half-demolished, disused structures were the signs of a place inhabited, lived in, experienced until it was used up; by showing them, Carlos Suárez confronted us precisely with our un-memory.

Here what he shows us goes beyond that situation. Or rather, it stays short of it, in a realm almost metaphysically prior to any possibility of a place being inhabited, lived in and experienced. The landscapes now occupying the Factoría Cultural are ones which, as Kotányi and Vaneigem would say, have been alienated from their natural past on the pretext of «shelter», but have not even become a bad future: the depthless future of urban non-places, rows of terraced houses, shopping centres or industrial estates with no possible memory, planned by developers or politicians.

Not even that: in these images, the space «without memory» is replaced by a space «without time»; that is, without one of the conditions that make any experience possible, reduced to what Robert Smithson — one of the great apostles of the urban and suburban drifts that so fascinate Carlos Suárez, along with Walter Benjamin and the subversive strollers of Situationism — described as «a land that has forgotten time».

Timeless City invites viewers to stroll through this suburb not of space but of time; but above all to stop being viewers, passive witnesses of a spectacle charged with ideology. Carlos Suárez’s intention is clearly political. As Benjamin and the Situationists would say, he seeks to provoke an awakening. Like all his earlier projects on this same subject, it aims to encourage city dwellers to undertake for themselves the (ideological) demolition of the everyday landscape, the distancing, recognition and emptying prior to action called for by one of the quotations from Kotányi and Vaneigem chosen by Suárez: «What we call construction starts here».

Published in asturias24 on 23 April 2015. [http://mas.asturias24.es/secciones/exposiciones/noticias/paisajes-y-vistas-de-la-ciudad-abortada/1429687015]