The shine of the colors, the geometries of the landscapes, and the almost tactile textures make the images of Tom Hegen (Königsbrunn, 1991) look like impressive abstract paintings, when they are actually objective documents of reality. Through aerial images the photographer and designer shows the human impact on Earth, searching for artificially transformed territories and inviting the observer to discover the world from a different perspective, placing them face to face with the dimension of their interventions and making them aware of their responsibility 
in the preservation of our planet. 

The images of Australian salt mines _x005F_x000D_ by young Melbourne photographer _x005F_x000D_ Emma Phillips are surprising for their simplicity bordering on abstraction. _x005F_x000D_ The huge mountains of bright, white salt conceal a landscape that is both human and alien, and that can only be placed in context by the structures or artificial machines that give them a graspable scale and a location on the map. The blue skies provide the backdrop for this dazzling natural space and make it more understandable. With these photographs Phillips wants to evoke the harsh landscapes of Australia’s interior.

Photographer Héctor Garrido (Huelva, 1969) tells, in the description text of this collection of landscapes, that Cayetana de Silva, Duchess of Alba, was an exceptionally beautiful and intelligent woman who lived at the end of the 17th century by the estuary of the Guadalquivir River, and that painter Francisco de Goya shared with her those unique landscapes during an intense period, which prompted a close relationship between both. Neither Cayetana nor Goya ever had the chance to fly, but in the artist’s Capricho no. 61, titled Volavérunt, the Duchess is depicted in dreamlike flight. Volavérunt is also the title of this collection of aerial photographs in which Garrido not only portrays the beauty of this emblematic nature reserve in Andalusia, but uses it also as a tool to take a census of the birds in Doñana’s marshlands for the park’s Biological Station. It is an important management tool he has developed over several years with his pilot Hans Nerlinger, and that makes it possible, on one hand, to gather data on the state of health of this protected space and its evolution in time and, on the other, it invites to envision, in each trip, what the eyes of the beautiful woman in Goya’s Volavérunt print had seen from the air.

When the tide goes down natural fractal formations appear (right), very often completely covered _x005F_x000D_ by thread algae, turning _x005F_x000D_ the seabed of the Bay _x005F_x000D_ of Cádiz an intense _x005F_x000D_ green hue (left).
_x005F_x000D_ The same marshes, covered with water and when the winds are down, produce amazing reflections between water and sky, with scenes like these of _x005F_x000D_ wild horses grazing _x005F_x000D_ in the water (below).

Fishermen fight against the strong wind in the estuary of the Guadalquivir River (left). The traces of the coming and going of men and machines on vast saline lands (right).
_x005F_x000D_ The Dunaliella, a _x005F_x000D_ tiny extremophile _x005F_x000D_ algae, dyes the hypersaline water _x005F_x000D_ of the bay red. The ridges or low walls _x005F_x000D_ built to channel the water currents jut _x005F_x000D_ out in the background (below).

José Manuel Ballester was born in Madrid in 1960 and graduated in 1984 from the School of Fine Arts of the Universidad Complutense in the same city. Though he chose to focus on painting early in his career, he soon began combining painting with photography, a field in which he would excel and gradually become known, meriting the Spanish National Photography Prize in 2010. Architecture is also a prominent presence in his career and in his images, as two simultaneous exhibitions reflect: ‘Mapamundi,’ in Galería Rafael Ortiz of Seville, and ‘Umbrales de silencio’ (Thresholds of Silence), at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente in Segovia. In the first Ballester takes stock of his own archive, stressing the importance of traveling and the impact it has on our lives, a matter he ponders on in the exhibition’s presentation text (“What would have happened if I hadn’t developed a need to know other places, their cultures and customs?”). The second exhibition includes fifty-two works carried out expressly for the occasion, where the artist photographs scenes of Segovia in search of the architectural, pictorial and natural richness concealed in the city’s private, cloistered or inaccessible places.

For the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, its curator Rem Koolhaas (Rotterdam, 1944) chose the title Fundamentals. Under this motto, the objective is to discover new paths in architecture by revisiting its fundamental elements. To this end, the Dutch architect and founder of OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture) explained that the exhibition would be “about architecture, not architects (...), Fundamentals will focus on histories – on the inevitable elements of all architecture used by any architect, anywhere, anytime.” It is no surprise thus that the exhibition curated by Koolhaas in the central pavilions of the Biennale should be titled ‘Elements of Architecture,’ and that it proposes an in-depth analysis of what he considers to be the fifteen key elements out of which architecture is made: floor, wall, ceiling, roof, door, window, facade, balcony, corridor, fireplace, toilet, stair, escalator, elevator and ramp. This exhibition, complemented with a catalogue organized in fifteen books, one devoted to each element, is the result of a research of over two years developed in collaboration with AMO (the research branch of OMA), Harvard University and a number of experts.