Photographer Ben Murphy presents an exhibition of work focusing on the architecture and habitats of counter-cultural communities living in a remote mountainous area of south east Spain. The exhibition features 21 analogue prints made over the course of ten years and is accompanied by a new limited edition book.
In a remote mountainous area of south-east Spain, multi-national, non-conformist individuals live out their versions of paradise in ephemeral, loosely bound communities. Here, people choose migration to facilitate an ideology, in an attempt to escape western society rather than join it.
In this landscape, distinct countercultural groups exist in hard to find places – along the banks of an infertile riverbed, in ravines and off mountain passes, in relative proximity to each other. People who reject and subvert the conventions of a structured democratic society from Europe, North and South America, Japan and Australasia gravitate to this area, making their temporal imprint on the land, local culture and atmosphere of place through the environments they stage and occupy. Temporal encampments appear then disappear. In a continual state of flux, some are relocated, some are destroyed by the local authorities, some are abandoned, then re-inhabited and reconfigured by others searching for a sense of utopia.
These photographs, made during extended trips over a ten-year period, show how international neo-nomadic countercultures are represented, reinforced and maintained through the customised trucks, vans, coaches and self-made dwellings they inhabit. Reflecting on values and expectations of home, society and freedom, and the inevitable paradoxes, compromises and entanglements inherent in rejecting the dominant system, the work aims to ask what it means to live an alternative life on the margins of the mainstream, and how these identities are expressed through dwelling and habitat.
PLEASE NOTE CLOSED 1-18 APRIL 2017 FOR AA EASTER BREAK
| Duration | 18 March 2017 - 27 May 2017 |
| Times | Monday to Friday 10am-7pm Saturday 10am-5pm (closed 1-18 April AA Easter closure) |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Architectural Association |
| Address | 36 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3ES |
| Contact | 020 7887 4000 / press@aaschool.ac.uk / www.aaschool.ac.uk |