TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes is showing the exhibition Vacíos del agua (Water Voids), by photographer Sergio Acosta, at Espacio TEA Candelaria. This exhibition, which can be visited free of charge in this room located in the Espacio Cultural Ayuntamiento Viejo until 30 June, deals with what has perhaps been the biggest change in the cultural and social paradigm of the Canary Islands in recent history, the transition from an eminently agricultural production model to an economic system based on tourism. Vacíos del agua will be open from Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 14:00 and from 16:00 to 20:00.
Vacíos del agua
The photographic series Vacíos del agua (Water Voids) deals with what has perhaps been the greatest change in the cultural and social paradigm of the Canary Islands in recent history; that is, the transition from an eminently agricultural production model to an economic system based on tourism. The great hydraulic infrastructures which until after the first half of the 20th century supported that way of life – visible at every turn in the landscape of the south of Tenerife – were gradually abandoned and forgotten on the island as a consequence of this shift, as if they were mute witnesses of a time gone by or scars on the parched land of the old agricultural estates and farmland. Thus, to a certain extent, this photographic series by Sergio Acosta is interested in documenting a world in the process of disappearing, and his works are therefore close to the documentary tradition initiated by the German photographers Bernd & Hilda Becher, who devised authentic catalogues of industrial buildings – barns, silos, towers, furnaces – in the process of change and modernisation.
However, the series Vacíos del agua transcends this first purpose and proposes a quiet reflection on emptiness in the full sense of the word. Sergio Acosta has gone very far in achieving a metaphor for silence. His photographs sometimes take on panoramic dimensions in order to place before our eyes the monumentality of the reservoirs that once held water, irrigated crops and supplied territories that are now forgotten, as if they were deep wounds in the landscape. His photographs take the form of colossal forms of absence, solar architectures, perforated in the landscape and almost underground, although open to the inclemency of the island’s midday sun. Desolate walls, mournful, disinherited like chains of abandoned terraces and nateros; but at the end diaphanous and beautiful, with unusual geometries.
Isidro Hernández
Sergió Acosta (Venezuela, 1970) is a visual artist and photographer. Civil Engineer, Master in Geographic Information Systems and specialist in Environmental Engineering. His photographic works have been exhibited in various art centres and photographic meetings such as Fotonoviembre, PhotoEspaña, TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Centro de Arte La Regenta and the Lanzarote Biennial, among others. His work forms part of the collections of TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, the Centro de Fotografía Isla de Tenerife, the Fundación Caja Canarias and the University of La Laguna, as well as numerous private collections inside and outside the Canary Islands. He lives and works in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
Espacio TEA Candelaria opened in October 2016 in the Espacio de Arte Ayuntamiento Viejo de Candelaria. It is the second Espacio TEA to open its doors after the one in Garachico. Espacio TEA Candelaria started with the exhibition ‘Birds’ by Per Lillieström. After this inaugural exhibition, Espacio TEA Candelaria has hosted ‘Limbo’, by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo; ‘Zoología fantástica’; one of the Atlánticas Colectivas of Fotonoviembre 2017, ‘Fazer horas’, by Daniel Jordán; ‘Re-Thinking the Trace’, by M. Lohrum; ‘La colección del doctor Ambrosio Betancor Perdomo’, by Nicolás Laiz Placeres; ‘La realidad es una sola’, by Efraín Pintos; and ‘Cebrián y Garriga’. In addition to this, TEA organised a drypoint engraving workshop in this space, given by the artist Carlos Rivero.