Ruins you can('t) see

The exhibition "Ruins you can('t) see" is a research project by the visual artist Jorge Conde with the aim of tracing the memory of a series of European settings of industrial origin that have recently been saved from neglect and transformed through cultural action, thereby modifying the physiognomy of the area and generating opportunities, tensions and irradiations of all kinds. Urban and suburban districts where, with greater or lesser success, different sociocultural initiatives have arisen, along with an emerging cultural scene. The project archive includes 135 institutions dedicated to the visual arts and contemporary thought, explored during more than a decade in 73 cities from 17 European countries.

As well as addressing such phenomena as gentrification, heightened speculation, ghettoisation and social dispersion, the study also prompts a reflection on the role of cultural institutions in historical storytelling, and the revival of the memory and critical analysis of the model of development which arose in the Industrial Revolution and Europe's colonial economic and production system, a process which may be useful both to restore a degree of recollection, and also to overcome some aspects derived from globalisation and the neoliberal model of hyper- consumption which we currently suffer.

Jorge Conde is a visual artist and researcher. He holds a degree in Fine Art from Barcelona University, trained in Music and Visual Arts at University of California San Diego (USA), and in Film at the National Film and Television School in London (United Kingdom). His artistic ventures take place within the sphere of hybrid visual culture, trans-codification and photography. His work reflects on the social, urban and environmental impact of the transformations that our contemporary cities and surrounding areas undergo. He likewise addresses the excesses of a society of hyper- consumption and the associated production model.