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    • when rain falls >
      • as it blurs, a wash of rain also takes away a certain degree of clarity while retaining a degree of distorting translucence
    • underground encounters >
      • descending into the depths of the metro is like crossing the threshold between inner and outer human experience, “... in any case, there was only one tunnel, dark and solitary: mine. “... en todo caso, había un solo túnel...
    • consumptions >
      • is an on-going project that approaches civic space as a suggestive canvass of consumption where reality and fiction cross both visually and ideologically
    • cuba waiting >
      • waiting in cuba is what people do, it is a cultural demeanor, a state of mind
    • cuba, una sola idea / a single will >
      • what are we and what will we be but a unique history, a unique idea, a unique will for all time
    • the tunnel of deceit: the barracks >
      • the tunnel was built, the train didn't come
    • the tunnel of deceit: the station that never was >
      • horses and lettered walls
    • unlimited growth inc: writings on the wall, spaces within, spaces whatever >
      • Beyond documenting a suggestive urban setting that displays contrasting civic structures and expressly comments on our global consumer culture, the images explore qualities of subjacent spaces-within...
      • they are fragments of a larger whole, and they are graphic instances of the allusive potentialities of light, darkness, color, disconnection and emptiness characteristic of any-space-whatevers.
    • riot night in canada: vancouver, june 2011 >
      • In as much as some of the store windows displayed mannequins -mostly of female figures-, and commercialized images of alluring femininity, the resulting violence also portrays an implicit aggression, intended or not, towards the human (female) body.
      • The initial photographs have been partially re-imagined and are presented cropped, refragmented, fractured, to establish a complementary relation between elements of form and content.
      • A fragmented/fractured style to portray, and correspond to, a moment of fractured civility.
    • "soy una raya en el mar fantasma en la ciudad": am a ghost in the city, a line in the water, a ray in the sea >
      • "pa una ciudad del norte / yo me fui a trabajar / mi vida la dejé / entre ceuta y gibraltar / soy una raya en el mar / fantasma en la ciudad / mi vida va prohibida / dice la autoridad..." (Manu Chao, Clandestino)
      • to a city in the north / I went looking for work / I left my life / between Africa and Europe / I'm a line, a dash, a ray / in the sea / a ghost in the city / my life is forbidden / according to the law…
    • scenes unseen >
      • to come
enrique manchon photographs...
The Tunnel of Deceit (Santander-Mediterráneo) 
 
In 1941 work was started, with the forced labor of both common and political inmates (republican prisoners of the Spanish Civil War), to dig a tunnel through the Cantabrian mountains of  northern Spain and thus complete a long envisioned project that would unite by rail the north Atlantic coast of the country with the Mediterranean.  It promised economic revival and national unification to many regions.
 
The seven kilometer tunnel represented the longest ever built in the country.  It was an ambitious engineering enterprise originally estimated to take three years to carry out –it would take seventeen.  It was called “The Tunnel of La Engaña”, after the name of the river that flowed by its southern mouth.  The name "La Engaña", or “Deceit”, would hold a prophetic curse.  
  
Over the arduous years of construction, as well as long after, men succumbed to accidents from falling rock, and to silicosis from the dust of the blasted silica.  Most of the infrastructure was completed and many sections south of the tunnel were operational. On either side of the tunnel the stations were erected.  But the rails for the tunnel and for the last northern leg to the ocean were never laid.  The tunnel had been built, but the train didn’t come.  The stations were not to be.

 
These are images of the now ruinous barracks that housed the workers and of a station that never
was.


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