The documentation and interpretation of the territory through different gazes, materialisations and approaches has been one of the CGAC's constant lines of work throughout its history. This endeavour, through both the production and the acquisition of works, has resulted in a collection that includes names as diverse and significant as Günther Förg, Gabriele Basilico, Humberto Rivas, Rubén Ramos Balsa, Ricard Terré, Francesc Torres, Hamish Fulton, Damián Ucieda, Xurxo Lobato, Juan Rivas, Mar Caldas, Manuel Sendón, Carme Nogueira, Andrés Pinal, Jesús Madriñán, Montserrat Soto and Virxilio Vieitez.
This exhibition showcases the project carried out by Manolo Laguillo (Madrid, 1953) between 2025 and 2026 based on a commission from the CGAC for its incorporation into the collection. The work documents the impact of urban construction elements, as well as industrial and economic processes, on the transformation of the Galician landscape.
His photographic gaze over the urban landscape is one of the most accurate and complex in the current European setting. He began working in Barcelona in the second half of the nineteen seventies and, ever since those initial photographs, he has developed a documentary style that places particular emphasis on the expressive qualities of architecture. The tensions his images reveal are those of architecture and ruin, construction and destruction, the past in the process of becoming the future, and the tensions between city, neighbourhoods and urban periphery, as well as between modernity and popular culture.
Although, through his own choice, Barcelona has been the principal focus of his work, he has also documented it through commissions from various public administrations to record the transformations of the urban landscape. Throughout his long career, his work has also extended to other cities such as Belfort, Madrid, Trieste, Beirut, Lleida, Berlin, Porto, Chicago, New York and Girona. He has also undertaken major documentary commissions for contemporary art museums, including a project for Valladolid by Museo Patio Herreriano (2022-2023) and another for Museo Universidad de Navarra (2014-2015), focusing on eight Spanish provincial capitals.
This project on Galicia makes no claim to be exhaustive and is conceived as a fusion between urban typologies that alter, enrich and pollute the landscape, and a series of random itineraries that underscore the collision between rural spaces immersed in urbanisation processes, infrastructures, quarries and industries that transform nature, and the city understood as an architectural space.