Exhibitions
Let's turn it around: looking at what persists with Joan Ramell and Jordi Aligúe
Jordi Aligué and Joan Ramell discuss light, shadow and the memory of spaces at the Espai Carles Hac Mor.
Donem-li voltes is a photography exhibition that proposes a slow and profound reflection on the gaze, light and memory of spaces. The project brings together the work of Jordi Aligué and Joan Ramell, two artists who, from different but complementary visual languages, explore what persists beyond human presence: shadows, traces and silences. The exhibition can be visited at the Espai Carles Hac Mor in Cardedeu from December 29 to January 30, 2026.
The title, Let's turn it around , already suggests an attitude: to look again, to insist, to turn around the image to discover its hidden layers. In this sense, the exhibition functions as a dialogue between two ways of understanding photography as a tool of thought and memory.
On the one hand, Joan Ramell focuses his research on the relationship between light and shadow, assuming the shadow not as an absence but as a significant presence. His images invite us to look at what usually goes unnoticed, what does not occupy the center of the visual field but which contains a subtle and persistent expressive force. As the artist himself expresses it: “Photographing a shadow is looking at what is not seen, the form without a body, the mute voice of the light that speaks to us”. This approach turns the shadow into a space of symbolic projection, where memory and perception are confused.
In parallel, Jordi Aligué develops a photographic work focused on the industrial archaeology of Sardinia, visiting old mining complexes that are now abandoned such as Argentiera, Ingurtosu, Laveria La Marmora, Rosas, San Giovanni, Monteponi or Sant Giorgio. Through his gaze, these disused spaces cease to be simple remains of the productive past to become landscapes full of aesthetic and poetic tension. The degraded structures, the eroded volumes and the surfaces marked by time are transformed into compositions of great visual power that challenge the viewer.
As the unfortunate Ester Xargay pointed out, Aligué's work turns disuse into language, and ruin into active matter of meaning. His photographs do not document, but interpret; they do not describe, but reformulate industrial spaces as scenarios of collective memory.
Overall, Donem-li voltes is constructed as a proposal that transcends the simple exhibition of images to become an experience of slow viewing. The exhibition invites us to inhabit the time of photography, to let ourselves be carried away by the relationship between light and shadow, presence and absence, past and contemporary perception. An invitation to look — and think — from what often remains on the margins.
