Xavier Ribas

Social Anthropology and Photography — Starting with What Is Visible, Then Researching What Is Not

Ribas studied social anthropology at the University of Barcelona and later documentary photography. The University of Brighton describes his work as an investigation of cities, geography, and history through photography, archives, and text^*1 Fotografia a Catalunya likewise identifies both social anthropology and photographic training as foundations of his work^*2 Oral Memories records that he completed a degree in social anthropology at the University of Barcelona in 1990 and studied documentary photography at Newport School of Art, Media and Design in the United Kingdom in 1993^*20 MACBA’s artist profile traces a continuity from Sundays through Nitrate in which present-day views of places are connected to historical and political research^*22 In a TANK interview, Ribas summarized his concern as how to move “from an object to its history”^*23That sequence explains why photography is useful to him. The camera can first fix the present condition of a fence, extraction site, or vacant lot in concrete detail. Why the object is there, who owns it, and which institutions or transactions produced it remain outside the image. Ribas therefore uses photography as the entry point to an investigation that follows causes invisible in the frame through documents, maps, and archives. Anthropology and photography do not duplicate the same information; they divide the work between a visible present and histories that cannot be photographed directly.

Sundays — Reading Post-Olympic Barcelona from Its Margins and Leisure Spaces

Made from 1994 to 1997, Sundays is an early major series showing families and friends spending their Sunday leisure time on vacant lots, in industrial zones, and along roadsides in Barcelona. Banco de España identifies both spaces outside the city’s official public realm and the ways people use them as central concerns in Ribas’s work^*3 In the collection work Untitled, Bellvitge, suburban ground and improvised leisure carry equal visual weight, making uses unplanned by urban development visible^*4Ribas photographed vacant land used for picnics and walks on the city’s margins after the 1992 Olympics, recording the gap between redevelopment plans and actual land use. MACBA holds Sundays as a 1994–97 series and specifically notes the picnics, walks, rest, and play that took place on vacant lots and in industrial areas at the urban edge^*18.

Sanctuary and Concrete Geographies — Photographing Structures Left after an Event

MACBA’s Nitrate exhibition framed the movement from Sundays through Sanctuary and Concrete Geographies as an expansion from the study of urban margins toward questions of territory and exclusion^*5 Concrete Geographies photographs fences in Ceuta and Melilla, scarred ground, and structures that restrict access. The University of Brighton records the work as research into territory, movement, and exclusion through the border fences of Spanish North Africa^*9Even without people in the frame, the height of a fence, a severed road, or damaged ground preserves policy in physical form. Instead of photographing the drama of border crossing, Ribas made the infrastructure that repeatedly produces that drama the subject of a series. In the 2008 Nòmades, after roughly sixty Roma families were expelled from a vacant lot in Barcelona, he photographed ground torn up by heavy machinery and cracks in concrete as a thirty-six-image series^*21By not photographing the eviction itself and instead tracing the event through physical marks left afterward, Nòmades makes the underlying question of Concrete Geographies especially concrete.

Ownership and Contracts Do Not Appear in a Photograph — Putting Documents on Equal Footing

In Ribas’s exhibitions, documents and writing do not function simply as captions that make the photographs easier to understand. Research documentation for Concrete Geographies shows photographic grids, texts, and archival material combined so that the border landscape is not reduced to a single meaning^*8 When Ribas described his interest to TANK as moving “from an object to its history,” he was pointing to the fact that the laws, ownership structures, and administrative decisions behind a fence or a patch of ground cannot be seen in the photograph itself^*23Nitrate makes the same problem even more explicit. Alongside photographs of extraction sites in the desert, Ribas places corporate material and records of finance and ownership to follow the route by which nitrate extracted in Chile became assets in Britain. The exhibition asks viewers to compare two distinct forms of evidence: a present visible in photographs and causes preserved in documents.

Nitrate — Following Capital from the Atacama to London

Nitrate is a long-term project that follows nitrate extraction in Chile’s Atacama Desert and the movement of capital into British companies, financial markets, and estates through photographs, documents, commodities, and maps. The University of Brighton’s Traces of Nitrate describes a collaborative investigation of how the mineral moved from extraction site to commodity, share value, and British asset^*6 In World of Matter’s Sites of Capital, financial spaces in London and traces of ownership far from the mines are treated as part of the same material history^*10 Acción Cultural Española describes the exhibition as combining photographs, polyptychs, texts, and moving images while also examining photography’s own capacity to record^*24Instead of asking desert photographs alone to stand as symbols of colonialism, Ribas traces where nitrate traveled and what forms of property it became, shifting attention from the appearance of a landscape to the verification of a route.

The Photobook Nitrate — Editing Research into a Sequence for Reading

The photobook Nitrate was conceived less as a record of an exhibition than as a research medium in which images and historical documents are read through page sequence. The University of Brighton bibliography records it as a publication containing texts by several researchers, underscoring its collaborative character beyond the format of a single photographer’s monograph^*7 The Van Abbemuseum library likewise situates the book around the relationship among nitrate extraction, colonial economies, and photography^*11After looking at photographs of the desert or buildings, readers can consult research texts in the same volume to establish facts about ownership and the movement of capital. Conversely, the present condition of extraction sites and buildings—information that research prose cannot substitute for—is available in the photographs. The editing assigns distinct functions to the two kinds of material. The ICP Library also holds Ribas’s 1998 publication IMAGO, showing that he circulated photography in book form before his later large-scale research projects^*16.

Nitrate at MACBA — Turning the Exhibition into a Documentary Apparatus

At MACBA, Sanctuary, Concrete Geographies, and Nitrate occupied the same exhibition space, requiring viewers to move among photographs, archives, moving images, and historical records. MACBA’s publication record includes essays by Carles Guerra, Louise Purbrick, and others, showing that the interpretation of the work was opened to collaboration with researchers^*12 The Photographers’ Gallery likewise presents Nitrate as photographic research connecting extraction sites, financial capital, and colonial history^*13 Acción Cultural Española explains that photography in the exhibition serves as a tool for rereading history while its own limits as a recording medium are examined in turn^*24Finished photographs are installed alongside documents and moving images, allowing viewers to compare different forms of evidence within the same space.

It Would Never Be Quite the Same Again — Linking Distant Events in Chile and Britain through Photographs and Documents

It Would Never Be Quite the Same Again is a 2015 project derived from Nitrate that connects acts of resistance, destruction, and memorialization in distant parts of Chile and Britain through photographs, artist texts, and reproductions of primary documents. ProjecteSD describes a body of work beginning with South American landscape photographs made by Mabel Loomis Todd in 1907 and connecting several events, including the destruction of a statue of Margaret Thatcher, as “distant echoes” of explosions in the Atacama Desert^*14 World of Matter’s nitrate-related material likewise moves among multiple sites rather than confining images of minerals, landscape, labor, and capital to a single region^*15 The same method appears in Invisible Structures. SOURCE describes the series as photographing terrain that initially appears to be untouched jungle but is identified through excavation and historical records as part of a buried city marginalized by established accounts^*25When excavation records are placed alongside a site that the present-day photograph alone would read simply as “jungle,” its history as an urban ruin becomes legible. Across projects, Ribas uses other sources to identify pasts that photographs by themselves cannot establish.

Photographing the Sites and Records That Produced an Event

Dramatic actions by politicians, police, or workers rarely appear in Ribas’s photographs. An Apollo review of Nitrate notes that although the exhibition addresses colonialism, migration, and labor exploitation, it is built from photographs, moving images, and archival documents and maintains a tension between documentary evidence and aesthetically composed landscape^*17 The Photographers’ Gallery also presents Nitrate as a long-term investigation of Chile’s mineral history beginning with photographs of nitrate works around 1900^*13The political force of these works does not depend on assigning an abstract significance to their visual quiet. The causes under investigation are often no longer present at the site. Ribas photographs the landscape as it exists now, brings in records preserved elsewhere, and makes the two available for comparison within the same exhibition.

From the Vacant Lots of Sundays to the Mining and Financial Networks of Nitrate

Sundays began as a response to the corporate image of Barcelona produced around the 1992 Olympics, photographing vacant spaces left between redevelopment projects as local people used them for picnics, conversation, and play^*19 David Campany identifies as central to the series the fact that urban planning and real-estate intentions cannot fully determine behavior, and that undesignated land can support forms of social life not anticipated by those plans^*19 In the later Nitrate, the field expands from vacant land to mines, ports, financial districts, and estates, shifting attention from the use of one place to movements of commodities and capital across several sites^*22Even as the method becomes more elaborate, one principle remains consistent: the appearance of a landscape is never asked to stand in for a complete social explanation. Sundays photographs the difference between the planned city and its actual use; Nitrate uses documents to follow the gap between an extraction site and the destinations of the wealth produced there.