Blank — collector's edition. The year was 2011. Against a backdrop of global economic crisis partly caused by banks, they began closing branches en masse, characteristically painting their windows white before leaving. The windows became opaque, an ironic metaphor for how many financial institutions operate. White, traditionally associated in Western culture with purity and beauty, acquired a negative meaning here. BLANK is the result of 6 years of work, including photographs made by Josep Maria de Llobet in Barcelona between 2013 and 2014. After exhibitions at the DOCfield 2016 and Revela-T 2017 photography festivals and various editing processes, the work was published as a limited-edition collectible book-object.
 
 
 
Specifications
 
 
 
Limited edition of 15 numbered copies, signed by the author.
 
Photographs: Josep Maria de Llobet
 
Edition: Josep Maria de Llobet & Alex Llovet
Text: Itziar González Virós
Design: Rubio & del Amo
Printing: Laboratorio para el Arte por Estudios Durero
Handcrafting: Àngels Arroyo, Tinta invisible
Case crafting: Maquetas Pojimbo
Die-cut and screen-printed methacrylate box, 21 x 47 x 2,5 cm
26 photographs
Paper Munken Lynx, 240 gr
All texts in English and Spanish
Publisher's stated price in the original description: 500€ + postage
 
Awards: ARTSLIBRIS Award, winner.
 
Text by Itziar González Virós included in the book
 
He hits the target, at point-blank range. He aims carefully and sees what nobody else sees. He follows the wreckage of the financial sector and salvages the white-painted windows of its bank branches. He takes them down from the walls, frees them from their restrictive frames, then gathers them all on the same pane of glass, on a dead-end street, in a landscape nowhere. This is Blank, the work Josep Maria de Llobet places in our hands, this time as a book. What we find inside, once duly displaced and torn once again from its surroundings, is the powerful display of the body of a crime. The financialisation of our economy and commodification of our cities could never have made life as difficult as they have without these local banks' silent complicity. Terminals scattered through our neighbourhoods. Urban devices for collecting our savings and wages, which eventually moved their old tempered-glass customer-service windows to the great shopfronts of our streets, where they pasted enormous advertisements depicting well-being, happy families and smiling pensioners. They carefully said nothing about what they planned to do if mortgages went unpaid. They did nothing to help us with their contracts' small print. Somehow they omitted the fate of savings painstakingly accumulated over a lifetime of work. Nothing. No trace of that initial display of empathy as a marketing strategy. Only white paint to make their love of opacity visible.
 
For all these reasons, this book is also the repository of the files of a forensic photographer who has spent six years assembling and analysing evidence: evidence of the crime. One by one, he has extracted it with the tweezers of his vision and arranged it in a new territory that allows us to understand what is happening to us. It was urgent not to waste time, to rescue our gaze from this repetitive landscape of concealment. If conquerors of old scattered salt over the ground before abandoning the city they had razed, the banks painted their great windows white. Both the white crystal of salt and the white glass of shopfronts are the victor's curse, a final blow before moving on. The impossibility of rehabilitation. The denial of any refounding of the plundered territory.
 
In the face of all this, the creative gesture of resistance can only be to reconstruct the urban landscape of devastation as a model. And to make visible, as seen in the texture of the layers of paint, the gesture of whoever painted the windows white.