Francesca Piqueras

Francesca Piqueras grew up in a family of artists. Her parents were close to artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray or Salvador Dali and she would often see them in summer, in Cadaques.

In this shiny universe, she grew up as a solitary and attentive observer. At the age of ten, she discovered her passion for making videos and was offered a camera she receives as a gift. She studied art history and cinema, and worked as an editor, without abandoning her passion for photography and cinema.

She presented her black and white photographs for the first time in 2007. Her first series focused on an urban world, magnifying the traces of urine that can often be seen in the city.

Marked by Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Il Deserto Rosso”, her interest is focused on a different type of traces: those of our industrial civilization. She switches to color photography and presents new works in 2011, “The Architecture of the Absence”, a series taken on sites of boats dismantling of ships in Bangladesh, and, in 2012, “The Architecture of Silence”, with photos of freighters scuttling in Mauritania. She pursues this artistic project between sea, sky, metal and rust through her interest in oil and military platforms.

“I photograph what man builds for economic reasons or for wars. Men invented incredible structures to satisfy their needs. They build in extreme situations, and in a way which may be questionable. But my point is not to denounce. On the contrary the madness of man, his paradoxes and contradictions interest me. The climax of the aesthetics of these objects is for me when nature takes them over. Time, rust and decay transform these architectures into sculptures and rewrite, poetically, the history of man. Our history.”

Today the artist works on several other projects about industrial relics all over the world.