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Background
BESI, Tres Xemeneies, Barcelona was my first photobook, published in a limited edition of 50 copies. It brings together photographs from a series of urban explorations carried out during a one-month residency in Barcelona, while I was simultaneously working on a city reader project for the German publishing house Esefled & Traub.
The initial motivation for compiling this book came from a specific metro construction site that, during my stay, offered a final opportunity to explore the abandoned extension of Metro Line 9. Hidden underground for more than a decade, a tunnel-boring machine had been left to rust in a stalled tunnel — a fleeting moment before the site was permanently sealed. I therefore view this book as both a tribute to and an archival record of this extraordinary place.
The book is structured in four chapters. The first focuses on the remains of this abandoned metro construction site and the BESI tunnel-boring machine itself. The second chapter moves to Tres Xemeneies, once Spain’s largest coal-fired power plant and today a monumental industrial heritage site on the Mediterranean coast. The third chapter returns underground, exploring one of Barcelona’s twelve stormwater detention reservoirs. The final chapter places these discoveries within the broader context of Barcelona’s distinctive cityscape.
