Winter Growing Fields: Landscape and Estrangement

The Almeria countryside in southern Spain is a harsh, dry environment which has resisted sustained habitation and up until recently has remained relatively poor due to low levels of investment. Over the last thirty years the region has become established as the country's region for growing supermarket produce. The long hours of daylight, hot and sunny climate and availability of subterranean reservoirs are now being capitalised on. Since 1970, 2,500Ha of industrial scale greenhouses have been constructed, which has dramatically altered the economy, cultural history and experience of this location. The region is visible from satellite as a shimmering unearthly light as the canopies of plastic extend further over the countryside. The regions in the west of Almeria were the first to be industrialised and now offer a clear illustration of an impoverished, inaccessible and abused land. Although lessons have been learnt, the wholesale strategic transformation of the landscape continues. The conversion of land by policy is not without challenge, but the economic benefits from producing products for supermarkets throughout the year are dominant.

The project responds to current, systematic and irreversible transformations of two areas. The first adjoins the Parque Naturale de Cabo de Gala and responds to the loss of the natural landscape and in contrast the new visual experience of a featureless, homogenized, utilitarian environment. Subtle signs of social occupation and specific land marks and characteristics are totally removed and replaced by systematically manufactured vast factories for the growing of fruits and vegetables. The second area of Adra accommodates the oldest abandoned greenhouses which are no longer viable and are slowly decaying. The greenhouses prohibit access to the land, remove all trace of 'the natural' and manifestation of geological time and put an end to any emotional or spiritual relationships with the landscape that could have existed in its natural state.

The photographic image has a long history in the representation of the changing natural landscape. Theoretical debates of the post-landscape, place, placelessness and non-place have particular resonance in the generation of this project. Whilst the research is contextualised within the politicisation of landscape it does not seek to explicitly promote environmentalism. Instead, through practice-led methodologies, it aims to generate images concerned with the transformation of natural sites to the man made, and its reverse. It examines: the conceptual space between reality and the natural world and artificiality and the manmade; the interplays between places as exterior stimulus and interior emotional landscapes; disengagement with the past; the disaffected and estranged landscape.
The investigation incorporates conceptual binaries such as space and enclosure, absence and presence, public and private, inside and outside, past and future. The work will be open to creative opportunities made possible by process and experimentation with both analogue and digital tools. The approach will be to: capture images through observation of two key locations over time; be open to opportunities and encounters in the field; investigate sensations of light, material and surface; work with material construction in the landscape; explore the progressive adaptation and refinement of source materials and images with studio tools. The shift of land use from open semi­ desert to alienating and homogenous, covered growing spaces offer an ideal and transferable model of our estrangement and the natural world.

The questions, methodologies, creative processes and outcomes involved should be of interest to both arts and cultural consumers and to academics from other disciplines concerned with knowledge and understanding of issues of landscape and human influence.