ANTONI MUNTADAS
Barcelona, Spain, 1942

Cercas (Fences), 2008
Twelve photographs on paper. Digital print
45,7 x 76,2 cm each
Edition 2/9
Acquired in 2009

Continuing his meticulous observation of the urban landscape and what its organization reveals about social structures and cultural habits, this time Muntadas focuses on walls and gates found in residential areas of cities or suburbs, and how these decisively mark the boundary between public and private space.

Picturing extreme situations of “protection”, these photographs denote the obsession of the dwellers in those properties to create the tightest possible separation between the street and their homes, between themselves and the rest of the world. One can ponder the degree of fear these images express, but also how, by shutting themselves in, these people actually engineer the condition of their own incarceration. This impression is further enhanced by the complete absence of human activity, and one is inclined to think that in fact no human traffic that ever crosses these “frontiers”.