Política hidráulica (Water Policy)

Hydraulic Politics is a work constructed by accumulating nearly a hundred photographs taken between the years 2004 and 2010 of reservoirs in Spain and Portugal that were planned in the 1930s. These strategic enclaves, whose gigantic engineering works have led to the expropriation of land and the modification of the landscape, are explored by the artist on foot before he goes on to take the aerial photographs that have been commissioned from him. Like official cartography, these pictures generate an imagery linked to political and economic power. Monumental in their own right, the photographs evoke the genres of landscape and history painting, but this spectacular vision is impaired by their arrangement in the room, piled up in corners in a way which almost duplicates the form of the photographed dams themselves, and underlines the function of appropriation and control over the territory in such interventions.