manuel alvarez diestro captures juxtaposing urban & natural landscapes

manuel alvarez diestro exhibits ‘the caves of steel’

With a curated a selection of his hanging city landscape sceneries from the past 10 years, architectural photographer Manuel Alvarez Diestro returns for a new exhibition in his house city of Santander, Spain. Titled ‘The Caves of Steel’, the anthological exhibition at COACAN encapsulates the photographer’s fascination with unearthing magnificence from somewhat mundane, monotonous architectural scenes.

This assortment makes a transversal minimize involving the photographer’s previous performs, capturing different juxtaposing intersections involving urbanization and the all-natural landscape throughout the entire world, wherein the city landscape appears to be to prevail in opposition to mother nature.

Hong Kong residential blocks engulfed in a normal backdrop | all images by Manuel Alvarez Diestro

capturing urbanization’s imprint on all-natural land

Manuel Alvarez Diestro, very best recognized for his pictures of the design of new metropolitan areas in Asia and the Middle East, draws on Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi novel ‘The Caves of Steel’ for his new exhibition of the same name. The novel imagines a foreseeable future whereby individuals possess a total domination of the world’s territory. ‘There was no question about it: the Town was the culmination of man’s mastery above the ecosystem. Not place vacation, not the fifty colonized worlds that had been now so haughtily independent, but the City,’ writes Asimov in his novel. 

Encapsulating this imposing human imprint on land, the Spanish photographer gathers a collection of his prior works from Tehran, Hong Kong, Toronto, Seoul, Incheon and Dubai, depicting many stages of the city constructed environments engaged in a surreal struggle with the purely natural landscape. ‘At the conclude any continues to be from character are completely omitted and changed by the extremely dense buildings,’ notes Diestro.

new household developments in the mountains of Pardis, Iran

The exhibition, showcased at COACAN and curated by Maria Arancha Vidal, will be running until 18 December 2022. At its opening ceremony, musician Opera23 performed a parallel electro-acoustic session titled ‘Steel’, increased by complementary movie footage by Manuel Alvarez Diestro himself and Factoria de Creacion.

The challenge has been incubated at TAI School of the Arts in Madrid, and has received funding by Gobierno de Cantabria and Fundacion Santander Creativa.

household residences in Sangil-dong, Seoul