THE TIME MACHINE
BY WALL DONE, 26/01/2012
The Time Machine is a body of previously unseen works, shot across Portugal between 2010 and 2011. Structured as a topographic survey of hydropower plants, built between the 1950's and 1970's, the work recovers a past of exciting technological innovation and optimistic belief in the future. It records spaces and objects that characterise a suspended time, that of the modern: machines and rooms which simultaneously place us in genuine science-fiction settings and in an unavoidable field of nostalgia. Because the future announced there is here now; and now we know that nothing has happened in the way that the ideological narrative of the modern wanted us to believe that it would.
No more than half a dozen people, including specialists and cleaning and security staff, run places which, in some cases, were intended to house up to 250 workers just fifty years ago. These people and their families were intended to live in real villages, hubs of population and urban development in a future which, today, has ultimately emerged as uninhabited.
At each dam, the automating of the machines has alienated the concrete and immediate power by which reality is governed and concentrated the control of a complex hydroelectric system in a distant centre, lending consistency to the possibility of fictionalising the controlling of man by machines which he himself created.
What can now be considered as false expectations of the future, or broken promises, stems from projects that were conceived when man and machine formed part of the same future, when the particular submitted to the universal. The work alludes to the paradox of this impossibility and his images are a testimony of the link that has been broken.
List of works (in order of appearance):
1 Alto Lindoso power station: instrument transformer cell in the busbar gallery (alternating-current generator floor)
2 Alto Rabagão power station: waiting room,
3 Miranda power station: machine hall,
4 Miranda power station: office,
5 Alto Rabagão power station: busbar shaft (view from the machine hall),
6 Lindoso power station: control room (frontal view),
7 Fratel power station: machine hall,
8 Caldeirão Dam: water intake tower for hydraulic circuit, ,
9 Alto Rabagão power station: meeting room,
10 Picote power station: emergency diesel generating set.
All images from the series, The Time Machine 2011 © Edgar Martins
This project was funded by the EDP Foundation
