Fabrica

Fabrica is a series of photographs of Fabrica Cal Garbat, a long-abandoned textile factory in the village of Vilassar de Dalt in Catalunya. The photographs were made while exhibiting at Revela-T, an annual festival dedicated to analogue photography. 

The organisers of the festival have cleared the ground floor of the Fabrica and make use of the empty building to host exhibitions and events during the festival. The upper floors, however, have been closed since the 1970s. The stillness of these slowly crumbling rooms, littered with decades of dust and debris, is punctuated by the light that pours through the huge windows. 

While the lively festival downstairs celebrated historical photographic processes once thought to be obsolete, I made my way through the silent rooms and found small, quiet details that held echoes of movement and sound long absent from the space.

The images are printed in the Cyanotype process, first invented in the 1840s and more often associated with architectural or engineering blueprints than photographs. The process has enjoyed a revival of its own in recent years, thanks in part to events like Revela-T which seek to both preserve and revive interest in historical photographic processes.