Sergio Belinchon: CIUDAD

PHOTOGRAPHY AFTER THE CITY I. The beginning of the 21st century is marked by an urban symptom both alarming and inevitable: the city abandons its old functions 3⁄4the functions of modern life3⁄4 and starts to be "something else". Like an independent monster, uprooting itself from its past representations and belongings, it has entered a later dimension. As a result, the city as space for congregation and work has given way to the city as scene of dispersion and of leisure (or unemployment); the space that until very recently operated as a fantasy of encounter and achievement is transformed before our eyes into a field of failure and loss; the concrete city-Paris, Rome, Berlin, Chicago- loses its contours and becomes the abstract city.

Meanwhile, the utopian cities 3⁄4those of More and Erasmus, those of Bacon and Campanella- are no longer useful for imagining urbanisation in the global city, as it has gone over the horizon of dreamed things to float like an independent platform discovering the parable of its own wreck. In short, all that which we continue to call "the city" has turned into what might well be called a "post-capital" entity, in both senses of the word. Partly in allusion to its old function of representation (the city as capital of a country, a state, a nation, a community) and partly referring to its position in the post-capitalist world, at a time when urban events are marked by the new economies in which, as occurs in electronic music, the rhythm of capital is programmed rather than produced, instead of simply being reproduced it begins to repeat itself.

Perhaps because of this, these perimeters, within which we feel an enormous tediousness, begin to be uninhabited through a strange paradox: even in the most extraordinary megalopolises 3⁄4there even more than anywhere else3⁄4 this period of over-population has created more solitary people than ever.

II. What, then, can we ask of photography at such a time? Firstly, we should remember something obvious: photography and the city did not always go hand-in-hand. Only in the modern age 3⁄4the apotheosis of both photography and the city- did this marriage take place. But although photography could not describe the founding of the city 3⁄4from Ur to Babylon, passing through Babel3⁄4 it is, nonetheless, a suitable support for capturing its dissolution, its transition towards that other thing which, lacking another name, one that will no doubt arrive in due course, we continue to call in the same way. Much the same is true of definitions used in photography.

We need only recall that period when the city and photography lived together in harmony was the same as that when Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag, Paul Virilio, Roland Barthes, etc, thought "about photography". Nowadays, however, photography 3⁄4at least the most interesting photography3⁄4 is that which thinks about itself. And I refer not only to photographers become theorists 3⁄4as Alan Sekula, Joan Fontcuberta and Daniel Canogar have taken it upon themselves to do, for instance3⁄4 nor of philosophers, such as Jean Baudrillard, who become photographers. I am talking about that point at which the photographic throws up a reflexive image with its own voice and its own language, perhaps through what Niepcer, the founder, called "solar writing".

III. This posterior, abstract city, abandoned to its own devices, is the city Sergio Belinchón portrays. This is why, at times, the subjects that appear in this section appear as if turned into stone, converted into mechanical beings, sleep-walkers inhabiting worlds we could well consider atopias, meaning spaces that do not become concrete places yet cannot either be considered utopian. They are not within reach, but have been superseded and vanquished.

They have been left behind in our experience and, while it no longer seems possible for us to go back to them, neither are they sketched out in the firmament as a goal. If the city was once defined according to its functions -urban, social, communal- then what we now inhabit is not necessarily a city, but a later state in which photography perhaps functions exclusively as a magical procedure capable of capturing the remains of that paradise lost. We should warn souls pained by this state of affairs that there is no sorrow at all for what is described here in these photographs.

Rather, Sergio Belinchón suspends over us a series of questions leading us to think about the way we have loosened the ties between experience and life, inhabiting and living, concepts now irremediably dissociated one from another. In such circumstances, it is no coincidence that Belinchón is concerned with so-called leisure spaces. Nor is it a coincidence that he explores them -as in the Ephemeral Cities series- when such spaces are not fulfilling their function.

His photographs portray the world's dysfunctional panorama, the way in which the city neglects its duties, when it reveals to us not its inhabitable nature but its capacity to expel all that went to define it for most of the last century. We might say, for this same reason, that we can only understand Belinchón's art in this posterior nature of the city and photography. At that point at which the city, like the typewriter or a camera in the hands of a tourist, has ceased to be useful to become something "usable" 3⁄4like an old vinyl record in a DJ's case.

One might object that many things still work in the city, and it is true. Nevertheless, it is also true that this does not greatly alter our discourse here. Perhaps for this reason, in The Vision Machine, Virilio reminds us of a phrase much repeated by photographers and generals alike: "when something works, it is already out of date". The way he handles this situation is what makes Sergio Belinchón a photographer of what Peter Sloterdijk has called the "age of epilogue". Belinchón is a photographer of what may be the only great task facing contemporary photography: to portray that which photography itself has omitted for over a century. The fantasy of acting after a neutron bomb has exploded must be lodged somehow in some speculator's dream, recondite and inexpressible.

To imagine oneself acting in the empty city, at our service without the people and without its patterns, to act like a founder at ground zero in supply and demand. In a perverse way, this fantasy is revealed here, and we appear in it as the future inhabitants of a ghost world, this after city that has declared the victory of the urbanite over the citizen, the crowd over the community, emptiness over solitude, expulsion over welcome.

Iván de la Nuez Exhibition curator and director of La Virreina exposicions

Pressetext

Sergio Belinchon
CIUDAD
Kurator: Ivan de la Nuez
Ort: Espai Xavier Miserachs