Aleix Plademunt is a Spanish photographer. In 1998, Plademunt originally set out his career not in photography but in technical engineering. After a two years he left this path to study photography at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. From the beginning, Plademunts first photographic projects aimed to explore significant investigation of landscape, an ongoing exploration that not only examines the most-debated topics today (standardization, spectacularization of landscape or its ubiquity in media culture) but also provides a reflection about his chosen genre. In 2007, he received a grant that enabled him to fly to Dubai to shoot for a three-month period. Today, Plademunt shares the results from his experience, “DubaiLand”.
Dubailand 2008
Aleix Plademunt’s approach to landscape is rooted in his reading of the signs and symbols he encounters. His reading is careful and detailed and centres on the action of man and its relationship to landscape. In that sense, Dubai appears as a very symptomatic place that is quite transparent about the social and ideological characteristics that have determined the artificial construction of its landscapes. Since such processes are happening all throughout the world, increasingly melting the idiosyncrasy of previously different cities in one single mode, the core reflection in Dubailand, as in many other projects by Plademunt, does not deal so much with topos, about the place, as much as about its process of dissolution. And thus, it is about the difficulty to keep reading and talking this universal language that Plademunt considers as the mother tongue that constitutes landscape or what he describes as our first way of communication before the first signs and symbols. Maybe his projects also talk about the need to finally assume what the symptomatic landscape of Dubai has to say about us.
Marta Dahó
To view more of Plademunt’s work please visit his website.