Log in to hire Joan

Joan Alvado

Photographer
  
Corpses of Cement
Public Project
Corpses of Cement
Copyright Joan Alvado 2024
Updated Apr 2014
Topics Abandonment, Architecture, Bubble, Business, Capitalism, Conceptual, Crisis, Documentary, Editorial, Environment, Europe, Globalization, Isolation, Landscape, Photography, photojournalism, Politics, Spain, urban development

CORPSES OF CEMENT
When Urban Developers Ruled the Earth.

Apocaliptic landscape after the end of the housing bubble in Spanish state.

According to the chronicles, the Spanish housing market went in early XXIth century through an exceptional period of economic growing. Historians often refer to this period as the Bonánzico/Welfaric. Land was owned and operated by forms of life now extincted; mainly, it was ruled by the reptile species known as urban developer. The urban developers were characterized by hoarding the maximum ownership possible of land, applying a constant rise of the prices to other species if they wanted to establish there. 

In mid-2007, however, came the abrupt cessation of this form of domination. The great extinction, the end of an era...

What caused this mass extinction that marks the end of the Bonánzico/Welfaric and the beginning of Crisogene period? Scientists and other expert still haven'nt find a clear answer, nor any responsibilities have been defined about it. You might even get to believe that the housing bubble hatched because of uncontrollable external factors such as the explosion of a supernova, or a period of great volcanic activity. In any case, the most common forms of life at the time began to die. First were the developers, dead in early Crisogene. With them disappeared the great saurian that had dominated the territory during the Bonánzico period: cranes, excavators, trucks, bulldozer... and all of the raw construction materials. Later it was banks who fell ... Everything then became barren, abandoned, deserted as all these species were disappearing from the face of the earth.

The resulting picture in the Spain of Crisogene era transports us, therefore, to a post-apocalyptic scenario. Still today numerous fossils can be seen around the territory. They belonged once to shiny new buildings, which were also surprised by the urban bubble burst, and now lie inert. Corpses of cement, with gigantic skeletons.

However, from today's perspective, most of the experts consider the end of Bonánzico era, in early  XXIth century, as a positive happening. The Crisogene and the subsequent periods, as it has happened before after other major extinctions of dominant species, were a key factor for the mammals to quickly diversify and evolve as a species.

www.joanalvado.com

10,903

Also by Joan Alvado —

Project

Cuba, Seeds of Autonomy

Joan Alvado
Project

Kurdish Women: Inside, Outside

Joan Alvado / Diyarbakir
Project

The Defenders

Joan Alvado / Barcelona
Project

The Last Days of Sulukule

Joan Alvado
Project

Shepherds 2.0

Joan Alvado / Aguiró
Project

THE LAB

Joan Alvado / Barcelona
Corpses of Cement by Joan Alvado
Sign-up for
For more access