Whoever drops these days by the Civic Pati Llimona center of the Gothic neighborhood of Barcelona, a municipal installation hidden behind a mouth, can see an interesting, already enigmatic priori, photographic sample in which the author, journalist and documentary photographer Jordi Jon , exposes images of tourist postcards of the 60s and 70s of the last century, but also of plastic seas, quarries, dry river beds or reservoirs that hide in their strokes.
It’s about Eroding Francoa photographic sample that investigates the inheritance received from the Franco regime in environmental matters, mostly in the form of large tourist centers such as Benidorm, aquatic parks and endless fruit and vegetable exploitations. But also in desert landscapes, artificial forests of pines or large extensions of embalmed water between arid hills.
“I have not wanted the work to be exclusively journalistic, but that I have also preferred to mix an artistic part with photomontages, so it is a hybrid between an artistic exhibition and another documentary,” says Jon about Eroding Franco. The reason, he argues, is that “visually document desertification is complicated if you have no temporary references.”
Therefore, in its montages combines images of a wild nature with other current ones where the armed cement dominates the landscape. “There are documentary montages such as overlapping of images, cartography or light interventions, but no photo is manipulated with Photoshop, they are all real,” he clarifies.
How the past affects the present
“I did an initial job in 2019 with a National Geographic scholarship with the aim of documenting desertification in Spain, but it was very complicated because it is very difficult to make visible if you do not know how the landscape was before,” says the photographer, who adds that as a result of getting the V Joana Biarnés scholarship A year ago, created in honor of what was the first photographer of the country, the project that is now exhibited in Pati Llimona could now consider.
The project deepens the key factors of desertification in Spain intertwining documentary photography with file investigation to offer a unique perspective on how past decisions affect the present. For its development and documentation, Jordi Jon has traveled for nine months in the provinces of Granada, Malaga, Almería, Murcia, Alicante, Valencia, Mallorca, Tarragona, Barcelona, Huesca, Zamora, Ávila and Madrid. It has compiled in them archives and testimonies that talk about landscape transformations and have taken most of the images that are exposed.
80% of Spain, desert for 2100
During the conversation with eldiaria.es, Jon cites a report from the Ministry of Environment that warned in 2017 that 80% of the Spanish territory is on its way to being a desert from here to 2100 if both climatic and activity conditions do not vary human on the environment. It also calculated the report that, by the seventeenth century, about three million hectares of the humid areas of the Peninsula will become arid.
At the moment the climate has few signs of investing its evolution and, with respect to human activity, the photographer is very little optimistic. “The root problem is that when the activities that support your economy are the same that are desertifying a good part of the country, talking about changes is a utopia,” he reflects.
Jon refers to tourism, but also to agribusiness and construction, pillars of the so -called “Francoist economic miracle” of the 60s of the last century. “The Francoism opted for these three sectors to get the country out of postwar misery,” explains this 28 -year -old journalist born in Cambrils – Poose Poles Geographic. Now, he maintains, we live with the inheritance of that bet.
Spain, place of garden and resort
“They are sectors deeply linked to each other, especially tourism and construction, which also imply environmental modifications with a very high water demand,” adds the photographer. He quotes the large number of pools and aquatic parks that constitute the tourist model of Spanish “Sun and Beach”, but also the need for water for vegetable monocultures or to consolidate the cement.
And, of course, due to the high water demand of these sectors, we must add the reservoirs, the flag infrastructure of the Francoism that should collect water to supply its growing “miracle”. A miracle that, Jon believes, “has not only eroded our territory but also our spirit.” It refers to the fact that as an inheritance he has left us “the belief that we have no other way to make a living as a country.” In fact, Spain is a world leading country in tourism and also in the manufacture of large infrastructure, as well as the one considered “European Huerta”. “Hort i resort”, Jon says in Catalan to summarize what we are: Huerta and Resort.
“Although the problem of desertification, which transforms fertile land into arid landscapes, is a global challenge, in Spain its impact is particularly strong,” Eroding Francowho says that “the decisions of the regime, during its 36 years, fostered a culture of destruction and disinterest in the environment, prioritizing economic growth.”
Between conceptual art and environmental complaint
In addition to a photographer and journalist, Jordi Jon is an environmental activist, founder of an environmental organization called Mon The water. “We are on the way to ninety -peak millions of tourists per year,” he explains. “Almost at the level of France, but with the difference that its tourism is very diversified and ours is almost a monoculture of sun and beach,” he says.
Thus, one of the images is an aerial photograph taken with drone of an urbanization in Torrevieja (Alicante) in which a huge pool that has the shape of Spain can be observed. “It is not a montage in this case, the pool exists,” Jon clarifies to clarify that the deep symbolism of the image is not intentionally. “Spain presents the paradox of being one of the countries with the highest number of pool per capita in the world, with a pool for every 35 inhabitants,” he says to contextualize the image.
On the other, an aerial photograph, also carried out with Dron on a water park near Malaga, emphasizes that it was especially interested because “during the civil war the enclosure was a military camp and then a concentration camp.” “It is a great metaphor of Franco’s inheritance,” he says: “From a holiday parking field and without a single official mention to historical memory.”
Another outstanding photograph is a montage that includes a study of UNESCO of the 70s on desertification in Africa in which a continuous desert that jumps the Strait is already shown and travels through the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Jon adds to the assembly an overlap in which it is observed how the large coastal tourist nuclei settle over the areas that UNESCO considers potentially desert.
The image of a group of older people on the shore of what a beach looks like is also shocking. It is actually a reservoir inaugurated by Franco in his day and that swallowed the town where they were born. “In some cases,” says the photographer, “the parents of some of these people lie buried.”
Finally, it is worth highlighting another assembly of a photograph apparently wrapped in plastic, in which one of the typical plastic seas that covers the fields of many populations of Almería is observed. The landscape is dotted with other photographs that show what it was before the greenhouse economy became the engine of the area. “It seems a lie that there are people who have become accustomed to living in the meantime plastic, who are continuously emitting polluting particles,” says Jon to conclude their explanation on the environmental inheritance of Franco.
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