Date: 2008

Technique: Siliconised colour photograph under methacrylate

Dimensions: 200 x 350 cm

Es Baluard Museu d'Art Contemporani de Palma

Reg. no.: 656

Not on display

Since the late 1990s Dionisio González has been developing a line of work centred on architecture and urban landscapes, creating interventions based on real shots with a completely unreal composition and at the same time showing different ways of living in the city. The series dedicated to the favelas of São Paulo (Brazil) or the pile dwellings of Dauphin Island (Alabama, United States) are some of the places he documents and analyses and in which he intervenes, reflecting that precarious popular architecture that is on the point of disappearing.

In Halong (2008), which belongs to a large-format series he produced between 2007 and 2011, the protagonist is the bay of Vietnam with the same name. With his visual strategies and unprecedented recreations, he makes the impact of mass tourism in the bay visible and using digital techniques, he locates house boat inhabitants in it. The continuity of these dwellings has been threatened by fishing restrictions since the bay was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.

The result of his intervention transmits the wealth and beauty of this natural setting, an apparently “friendly” composition – González does not delve into the real difficulties of the population –, which becomes a symbol of his demand that these dwellings survive, and above all strives to make the people who live in them visible. At the same time, on the right of the composition the Seville-born photographer includes an architectural design of his own, an architecture imagined by himself, construction of which is possible.

E.B.

Artist biography