2024–2025
Abandoned Future
Six generative images of fictional abandoned factories consider Uruguay’s mid-century industrial ambitions through the imagined remains of their promise.
Abandoned Future (2025) consists of six large-format digital prints of fictional abandoned factories. Generated images of crumbling concrete, rusting steel and overgrown vegetation draw on Uruguay’s industrial architecture, placing the promise of modernisation beside the material appearance of its abandonment.
The work takes Luis Batlle Berres’s industrial ambitions as a point of departure. He was President of Uruguay between 1947 and 1951 and chaired the National Council of Government between 1955 and 1956. The period’s policy of import substitution sought to replace imported goods with domestic production, expanding industry in a country closely associated with agricultural exports.
The images
These factories are invented rather than photographed, although their visual language belongs to an identifiable industrial past. Their detailed surfaces and distortions allow an imagined ruin to resemble historical evidence, while leaving the history of the depicted building unavailable: there is no original factory to recover.
Through this combination of plausible appearance and fabrication, the series considers how Uruguay’s industrial aspirations persist in cultural memory, and how the promise of progress can be represented through its apparent remains.
This artwork was developed as part of a project supported by the 2024 Arts & Humanities Grant Program of the Research & Innovation Office at the University of Colorado Boulder.
