Sand Castles
Spain was one of the countries hardest hit by the European economic crisis in the late 2000s, due to a toxic combination of billions of euros worth of bad loans held by Spanish banks and a real estate bubble that burst in spectacular style in 2008. Ten years later still thousands of empty houses, that were built in a dizzying rush by developers to make the most of cheap loans and favourable government regulation, litter the landscape across the country.
Moved by the need to capture the absurdity of the situation and to show the apathy of the authorities, the Bilbao photographer Markel Redondo began to travel around Spain after the 2008 crisis to record the consequences of unbridled urbanism. Almost ten years later, he has revisited these places, including new locations, and provided new data after deciding to take photos with a drone to get aerial views. This decision, apparently simple and with technical deliberation, has resulted in images with a much deeper meaning, because they give a bird’s eye view and reveal the appearance of a new type of modern ruin. These constructions do not contain stories, feelings or murmurs of the past but on the contrary show the skeletons of constructions where there has never been any life. They are mirages of human greed where we find neither longing nor pain, only the impression of being the last inhabitants on earth.
