"Min Turab"

Taking its title from an arabic expression meaning 'that wich emerges from the earth', Min Turab is a visual investigation on the oil-monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula and how the oil –a natural resource that takes millions of years to form beneath the earth - is capable of rapidly transforming the landscape above the earth's surface once it is extracted and manipulated by humans.

In the last decades, the landscapes of the Arab Gulf region have undergone a mutation driven by increased income from the oil, globalization and mass tourism. These countries have seen a huge transformation, moving from the nomadic, traditional and austere lifestyle of the desert bedouins to a postmodern, urban and consumerist society. Using the territory as a source of analysis, "Min Turab" raises a critique of the disruptive modernization of the oil monarchies of the Gulf as well as the dollarized spectacularization of its landscapes.

Although this itinerary may be somehow reminiscent of the 19th-century grand tour, in "Min Turab" the attention is not focused to the most popular sites of photographic pilgrimage but in the opposite direction. The areas to study point to the newest centers of unbridled urban development with an approach from the outskirts, the periphery, and the back alley. "Min Turab" steps back a few miles and takes in his secondary, less privileged view, addressing towards the 'small'. Apparently anecdotal details, at least in this case, end up being the most meaningful of all. Taken together, the project, developed for a decade, calmly scrutinize the exact places where landscape alteration, linked to oil as a main agent of change, has produced a fatal discord, a sort of friction that destroys earlier visions and ideas of a place: the notions that we might have as uninformed foreign spectators, or that locals might have as they deal with landscapes transforming rapidly before their eyes—landscapes that, for the first time in history, they will outlive.

But the series also has important geopolitical implications. What would scarcely be remarkable in a Western city is scandalous and fascinating in equal measure to foreigners visiting places like Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha and Dubai. It is hard to resist criticizing the overwhelming deployment of technology only to escape to the equally atrocious spectacle of globalization in countries other than our own. If the classic conception of landscape, which many of today’s photographic projects have inherited, helped naturalize the ideology of unequal social relationships and disguised the reality of the historic conflict implied therein, then the challenges that current photography must face when reflecting on an increasingly complex landscape are clear. That does not mean, however, that they will be at all easy to address. Perhaps, by identifying the blind spots where waves of images are being swept away and replaced by others of a very different sort, Min Turab allows us to confront this new visual regime that imposes the conditions of hyper-visibility of some landscapes and the dramatic dismissal of others.