Miguel Ángel García defines his series IN-DEPENDENCIES (2008-2012) as an analysis of the yearning for independence, privacy and personal identity among the citizens of the Europea 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 independences that are in game, and allude to the dialect between difference and fusion.

This body of work therefore consists in creating “maps” of the dependencies in each of the capitals of the UE by highlighting the attics, chimneys, satellites, skylights, etc. The use of Google Maps and Flickr are instrumental in choosing the locations, and thereafter García creates panoramas in situ. At the end of this process, which has taken him all over Europe in the past four years, there are two graphic synthesis of the dependence/independence opposition. These final landscapes are the result of the layering of the panoramas of each of the 28 European capitals, so that the transparency and opacity of each layer is regulated by the quantity of results obtained in Google from searching for the concept of independence in connexion to each capital.

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 the 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.

Joan Fontcuberta
‘Photography 2.0’ exhibition - Photoespaña 14