Culture. Architecture. Place. "Blanco sobre Blanco" by Fernando Alda photographer

Fernando Alda is a referencial photographer in the current scene of architectural photography, whose work we have been presenting systematically in relation to the projects of architects in Eurpoa and America, and to whose work we have paid special attention in FERNANDO ALDA. Architecture Photographer and in The aesthetics of vanishing, the new personal work of Fernando Alda.

Framed in the CAL project. CAL, the Spanish word for lime, doubles as an acronym for Culture/Architecture/Place (Cultura/Arquitectura/Lugar). Promoted by the Contemporary Architecture Foundation with the aim of bringing contemporary architecture closer to rural areas, highlighting its connection to cultural landscapes, the White on White exhibition is born.

Carried out by Fernando Alda, usually dedicated to photographing contemporary architecture, the project has been a challenge given the traditional view that is popularly had of lime and its uses.

The work is presented as pairs of architectural images, contemporary and traditional, white and in Andalusia, seeking a dialogue with each other, sometimes clear and sometimes hidden, seeking the complicity of the observer and a narrative where the infinity of the white against the blue of the sky, with slight nuances that, like wounds on the skin, record the passage of time.

They have photographed buildings or architectural elements, traditional and whitewashed, under the most contemporary and personal look possible, and have rescued contemporary projects that slept in the archive to make them coexist and dialogue seeking to mix the values that exist in each of them and without making priorities clear, without the desire to denounce, with serenity and moving away from the documentary language to get closer to the qualification of art applied to photography. A search to enhance the photographic and artistic value of the model far from its own technical-aesthetic conception, at the hands of an architect, to take a new life in the hands of a photographer.

There has been an effort to take the images to a common identity away from the traditional echo in some and the rigidity of the technique in others or simply extracting them from their context, looking for the most emotional and poetic side that can arise from the union. In short, to create a joint representation from the dream of some and the reality of others without making clear what is the role of each one.

Foundation

Lime is a material of immemorial use, surely emerged accidentally after the hydration of calcined limestones that surrounded a primitive fire.

But beyond its materiality and its ancestral use as a binding and coating in a multitude of construction processes, it is above all an important link in our territorial identity that unites us to nearby societies such as the Portuguese one on our western flank and the Moroccan on our southern flank, to comment only the closest.

The Cal as a common thread of a set of vernacular architectures of white and blue volumes, purified under our intense southern light and devoid in their forms of any boast or unnecessary gesture.

The Cal as the fundamental architect of a set of scattered buildings and white villages that sprinkle our territory and that have shaped part of our cultural identity, and that century after century, have been deposited in our collective, social and architectural memory.

We believe that, if we make a small effort, we can recognize a large group of contemporaneous architects around us who, in one way or another, have gravitated much of their architectural production around a similar way of understanding architecture and its materiality.

Perhaps, dragged through a contemporary process of reinterpretation and projective abstraction based on the essentialist use of space, volumes and material means, textures and color.

Projects such as a recreational home in Zahora, a small project for the rehabilitation of a home in Alenquer or a set of social housing in Los Palacios so many times studied and recreated, have served us more than once as a guide and reference in a qualified way of understanding contemporary architectural production.

An architectural production where the intellectual strategy seems to be based on an intentional simplicity of gestures, strong materiality and the intense use of white color under the effects of light.

An architectural production that before the territorial origin of its authors, makes us suspect that perhaps, either consciously or unconsciously, they have been imbued with a series of plastic references rooted in our own cultural identity where lime has been a fundamental actor.

Perhaps or perhaps not, it is a product of an intense and fruitful contemporary discourse between the Architect armed with his memory and his capacity to manipulate materiality, and the Light that floods our entire territory of the South.

Currently, lime is the object of a continuous process, perhaps slow but praiseworthy, not only as a symbol of cultural identity, but also because of its historical, cultural and ethnological values. Especially since November 2011, the Cal de Morón was declared by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

This recognition has focused on the manufacturing processes, as well as the recovery of the associated trades and the recovery of ovens and informative and interpretive spaces. All implemented with courses for professionals and the possibilities of new applications of lime as a binder.

On the other hand, the incidence of gender aspects in the use of lime in the inherited constructions is not negligible or residual, because although the hard trade of 'caller' was reserved for men, the maintenance and decoration of the houses, dignifying and whitewashing of the elements that we put into value today, has been an activity reserved for women who, every spring and year after year, began the previous work of slaking the lime and preparing the material and then proceeding to whitewash the home.

And with this, they not only maintained and still maintain some ornamental work that pursued the maintenance and waterproofing of the walls, but on many occasions it pursued the dignity of the family through the pristine image that the lime offered, bequeathing us with their individual effort but of collective effects, a group of white towns that define an entire territory.