In 2020, María José Jove Foundation from A Coruña invited me to be, in collaboration with Juan de Nieves, the editor of a publication by photographer Damián Ucieda, in which Ucieda’s photo essay was to be presented alongside a selection of archival documentation illustrating the project’s context.
“In addition to the photographs from Camiño negro, this book brings together four essays that analyze the implications of Damián Ucieda’s photographic work from various perspectives: art history, the environment, urbanism and new uses of land, and the energy and eco-social crisis that looms as an increasingly real and imminent threat to contemporary society. These essays are complemented by two elements: on the one hand, a chronology that, based on visual and textual documents from a wide variety of sources, summarizes the historical and social context in which an oil pipeline and a refinery were planned, built, and have coexisted in the city of A Coruña for more than half a century; and on the other, the spontaneous—but no less accurate—analyses that some of the people who live with the industrial complex on a daily basis offer in their appearances in the video that forms part of the project (…).
Camiño negro – Damián Ucieda is, therefore, a choral work, in which the photographer’s gaze is surrounded by other voices—from the world of art and beyond—which, taken together, describe a complex reality in which different ways of relating to the environment overlap and coexist without interruption.”
(Fragment of the editorial note by Mela Dávila and Juan de Nieves)
