Shot between 2010 and 2011, The Time Machine is structured as a topographic survey of hydro-electricity generating plants in Martins’ native Portugal. Working closely with the EDP Foundation, Martins gained exclusive access to 22 power plants located across the country.
Many of the power stations were built between the 1950′s and 1970′s, a time of hopeful prospects of rapid economic growth and social change. Their tacit raison-d’être was to fuel the country’s expansion and propel it into a prosperous future.
Forty years on, no more than half a dozen people, including specialists and cleaning and security staff, run places which, in some cases, were intended to house up to 250 workers just a few decades ago. These people and their families were intended to live in real villages, hubs of population and urban development in a future which, today, has ultimately emerged as uninhabited.
At each dam, computerised mechanisms now regulate the production and distribution of energy. This has alienated the concrete and immediate power by which reality is governed and concentrated the control of a complex hydroelectric system in a distant centre (thus lending consistency to the fantasy of machines ruling over man).
The Time Machine is not just about the generation of power of also of dreams and technological utopias.
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The Time Machine
Date:February 2013
ISBN:978-0-9569085-0-6
Dimensions:360mmx420mm
Pages: 156
Edition: 800
Foil-stamped hardcover, housed in a screen printed acrylic slipcase
English & Portuguese
Essays by Geoff Dyer, João Pinharanda
About the Author
Edgar Martins is visual artist woking across different media. His work is represented in several high-profile collections, such as those of the V&A, RIBA, the Dallas Museum of Art; MAST , MUDAS, Modern Art Centre Lisbon, MAAT, Fondation Carmignac, amongst others. He has published over 16 books which were met with critical acclaim and exhibited internationally. He was selected to represent Macau (China) at the 54th Venice Biennale.
Author the Writers
Geoff Dyer is a recipient of a 2003 Lannan Literary Fellowship and the 2006 E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His many books include The Ongoing Moment, which won an Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, But Beautiful (winner of the Somerset Maugham Prize), Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist, in America, for a National Book Critics Circle Award), the novels Paris Trance and Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.
João Pinharanda is a curator and author. He was art consultant and programmer for Fundação EDP until 2007. He has staged numerous high profile national and international art exhibitions since 1985. He was the curator of the official representation of the Portuguese galleries at the Arco International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid (1998) and the Estampa International Print and Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid, 2005.
£99.00
