Creating landscapes

Created by the Fabra i Coats Landscape Lab 
Masters in Landscape Intervention and Heritage Management, UAB-MUHBA

The factories of the 19th and 20th centuries have lost their production purpose, those manufactures that shaped the urban industrial landscape all over Europe. Today, the recycling of the city’s industrial fabric allows us to imagine new uses for these premises that are both a testament to the industrial civilisation and the holders of new meanings for the digital society era. What new landscape will cities manufacture in the post-industry century? If the urban landscape always translates a specific urban culture in its shape, what is that culture like in the cities of today? 

The Fabra i Coats Landscape Lab has produced Creating Landscapes, an interactive installation that reflects on this relationship between the factory landscapes of the past and the digital city of the present.

The Creating Landscapes exhibition transforms the Fabra i Coats space using physical elements and audiovisual projections: a structure of ribbons, a metaphor for the textile production that gave the area and the factory its purpose for so many years, intertwines with the projection of images that show how other old factories (other European “Fabra i Coats”) have been recycled to accommodate contemporary uses throughout the Old Continent. The installation encourages visitors to transform the exhibition according to their criteria when they manipulate the structure of ribbons. The projections of factory images make us question the new role of the 20th century factories in a 21st century city and lead us to wonder how to make these, now obsolete, old infrastructures interact with the neighbourhoods that surround them, so that they continue to create the city... in a different way. The structure of ribbons shapes an ever-changing story about the future of Fabra i Coats and at the same time calls for the need to weave, sew and tie together relationships with the Sant Andreu neighbourhood, based on the new potential uses that the factory will accommodate. 

Curator: Fabra i Coats Landscape Lab (Marina Cervera and Francesc Muñoz)
Authors: Students on the Masters in Landscape Intervention and Heritage Management, UAB-MUHBA: Ksenia Boksberg, Clara Terradellas, Andrea Montserrat Venegas Torres and Chiara Vesnaver.