designed for hundreds of staff, but arenow run by half a dozen. ‘What cannow be considered false expectations,’says Martins, ‘stem from projectsconceived when man and machineformed part of the same future’, butthen machine control was automated,and the images are ‘a testimony of thelink that has been broken’.
Despite Martins’ trademark lack of humans, he is fascinated bytraces of the human touch: a pot plantat Miranda, a rumpled carpet at AltoRabagão that seems to be lapping likethe sea at an empty chair. Look closelyinto Fratel’s machine room and you’llfind a suspended nativity scene inneon, almost lost in the vast cavern.
The Time Machine is more thanindustrial photography thatscrupulously documents structures,like the Bernd and Hilla Becherpictures of water towers. It is also an exercise in what Martins calls‘suspended time’, and it exploresambiguities about built space. Hisstraight-down view of the Pocinhounloading dock, for example, abstracts it into a flat, oblong motif.
There are many things in theseimages: a nostagia for retro-future, areverence for technology, a play withscale, and not least a disquieting,mysterious emptiness. The onlyexterior shot is of a water intake tower at Caldeirão, shot on a foggy morning.A natural optical illusion suggests itsshaft contains a field of rocks: anothermystery in a mesmerising collectionthat warrants tranquil contemplation.
Simultaneous exhibitions of TheTime Machine run at the WappingProject, London SE1 and the Museu daElectricidade, Lisbon, until 5 November.
immune to illusion or allusion. Takethe Miranda do Douro power station,built 1957-61. Martins’s shot of themachine hall shows walls of brick,actually a purely superficial surfacecovering the whole plant, and delicatecurving supports reaching to a blue-painted barrel ceiling evoking sky orwater. The equivalent but vaster space
at Fratel (built 1973) cuts curves ingraceful brutalist structural concrete.Unlike Salazar’s strange heroic Lisbonmonuments, Martins sees the hydro-electric architecture as ‘more European and progressive’. Elsewhere,designers like Pier Luigi Nervi in Milanwere happy to engineer aesthetics intoconcrete. Martins feels the New Statedesigns show ‘a willingness to markand celebrate’ the ‘heroic political will’of the era, bewitched with technology.
Control rooms date these places.At Lindoso, designed in the Sixties, agreat grey bank of manual controls sitsheavily before a yellow wall of gauges,as if in a sci-fi B-movie. Travel forwardin time to when the biggestPortuguese dam at Alto Lindoso wascompleted in 1993, and big boxycomputer monitors and chunkykeyboards seem to reflect the retro-futurist early digital period. What’smissing, of course, is the boffins toman this kit. Some facilities were
Carnation Revolution, the newlydemocratic country continued toinvest in the renewable resource.Nowadays, local environmentalgrounds prevent plans for newdams. Martins says: ‘The reason Iphotographed newer dams and power stations was to experience the difference between differentprojects,’ as well as ‘referring… to the failure of [Portugal’s] modernistproject as a whole’.
The New State’s project may havefailed, but the power stations stilloperate, upgraded examples offunctional efficiency. Its obscurearchitects’ and engineers’ formsfollowed function, but were not
Edgar Martins’ photography takes us to strange locations and makes themstranger still. His latest project, TheTime Machine, is the result of a‘topographical survey’ of 20 hydro-electric power stations in Portugal.They penetrate a deserted industrialworld, as if frozen in time and chancedupon by a future explorer.
In Martins’ photographs, the built environment takes on an uncanny quality. For example, in his A Metaphysical Survey of BritishDwellings and Dwarf Exoplanets(Blueprint 296), a Potemkin villagecomplete with British high street signsand built as a police training facility,becomes a dark dreamscape under a black sky. His 2009 series, This Is Not A House (at the New ArtGallery, Walsall, until 24 December)catalogues abandonment after theAmerican property crash. In The TimeMachine, as in previous projects, thereis a sort of super-reality derived fromMartins’ long exposure and lightingtechniques, and the inference of anunseen human presence.
The Time Machine could refer tothe absence of clues such as humansto date the pictures, or the periodswhen the facilities were built and theirown futuristic aspirations. Underdictator António de Oliveira Salazar’sEstado Novo (New State) regime,hydro-electric was to power a vastindustrialisation of Portugal, but evenafter his successor, Marcelo Caetano,was swept from power in the 1974
BLUEPRINT NOVEMBER 2011
THE TIME MACHINEBy Edgar MartinsPublished by The Moth HouseExhibition until 5 November Wapping Project, SE1by Herbert Wright
>>BOOK/EXHIBITION
Right: The Fratelpower plantmachine room
Below: AltoLindoso powerplant, control room
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DESPITE MARTINS’TRADEMARK LACK OF HUMANS, HE IS FASCINATED BYTRACES OF THE HUMAN TOUCH
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