#offchain
About this series
Fordlândia is an imagined location where the technical and commercial utopian dreams of the 20th Century clash with the realities of the 21st Century in Ramirez-Suassi’s poignant and sculpted images and comprise the cast for this surreal melange.
The Amazon is much more than a river. It is the visible appearance, infinitely rich in analogies, of the reality of things. This seems obvious, when poetic languages intervenes to describe reality, the latter loses its documentary sharpness and is converted into a creative fantasy, especially in the specific sense that the river embodies the ironic and sombre essence of the universe.
I have contemplated this river and its affluents in small doses, and small steps, because like a bashful child, it only showed its epidermis; this I found irritating.
But traveling so sedately meant that all that surrounded him remained hidden until the river itself disgorged all its "splendours" along its various stretches: globetrotters, beggars, preachers, drunken aborigines, ruined foremen, minor politicians, lumberjacks, monks, soldiers, melancholic prostitutes... "I find it strange that the beautiful image of this river, is in reality a beautiful imperfection,” states JM Ramrez-Suassi.
And Fordlândia, Henry Ford's attempt to transform the jungle into a fantasy of the American Mid West, is the perfect imperfection: a perfect failure of the American Way of Life.
Artist Bio
JM Ramrez-Suassi, who now resides and works in Madrid, was born in Mallorca, Spain. His images involve numerous visits to the same locations to track change over time, while initially appearing to blend perfectly into the great nowhere. His art falls somewhere in the gray area between portraiture and social landscape. Ramrez-Suassi has published the photo book One Eyed Ulysses and Fordlândia9.
Photographer: JM Ramírez-Suassi
Twitter: @jmsuassi
Instagram: @jmsuassi
Photo book: Fordlândia 9
Photos copyright JM Ramírez-Suassi
DRAWLIGHTS | 1/1 – one post/one photographer, weekly. Off-chain and on-chain. By Peter Nitsch, lens-based artist, a member of Jenny Metaverse and lifetime Member of the Royal Photographic Society of Thailand.