Invernaderos

Langford’s practice-led research investigates a range of exceptional geographical spaces in Almeria, Southern Spain - recognisable as the filmic setting for Leone’s The Dollars Trilogy (1964-66) and influential in García Lorca’s Blood Wedding (1932). The current phase in the long history of this region is a pervasive and intrusive reconfiguration of the semi-desert for global agri-business, currently resulting in a 25kHa labyrinth of plastic greenhouses for the production of monocultures. New economic priorities have imposed irreversible changes to that natural habitat and terminate the possibility of aesthetic experience inspired by natural stimuli or emotional union with land/landscape. Although the research conducted longitudinally resulted in two discrete bodies of work the overall aim has been to interrogate ways that metaphysical and experiential relations with the physical world might be conveyed visually. Differentiating his most recent work from his earlier photography is a shift from dualism as an analytical springboard (open-closed, private-public, natural-man-made) to interrelations influenced by phenomenology, humanistic geography and critical theory on space and place. Both sets of outcomes comment on evolving human/technology-nature apprehensions and aim to express how change and intervention feels at an intimate level