Poetics of Abandonment

In the gaps between architecture and nature, the Spanish architect and photographer Iñaki Begera documents the scars of our territories.

The economic crisis hit the building sector hard and transformed the landscapes of the dream that architecture had been living, leaving many megalomaniac works of star-system figures unfinished. The restoration of the old Panticosa Spa in the Tena Valley and its conversion into a tourist center suddenly came to a halt in 2008, and Siza’s projects —with Jesús Manzanares— for a High-Performance Sports Center, apartment hotel, and parking facility became ruins resisting the passage of time.

The neglect and deterioration of incomplete architectures is a constant theme of Bergera’s shoots. He flees from the trite nostalgic and romantic view of ruins, preferring to portray the changes suffered by truncated structures, which in this case nevertheless preserve the Portuguese master’s idiosyncracies. The photographic series unfurls a new poetic of abandonment, and the aborted architecture of Álvaro Siza engages in a strange and intense fusion with the territory and landscape of the Pyrenees.