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Conversation with Jose Manuel Ballester. 60 views of Ferrovial
Jose Manuel, how do you approach a project of this magnitude,
where it's not a question of photographing one place, but many places,
while also offering a vision based on a specific objective,
in this case, Ferrovial's 60th anniversary?
This project was a great opportunity.
Although I have worked for many years with the industrial and construction sectors
in 1985 I took the first photos of Rafael Moneo's Atocha train station
never before had I undertaken such an extensive, large or ambitious project.
The idea was to portray Ferrovial as it is today.
However, even though I visited 35 projects and travelled non-stop for an entire year,
the "portrait" is incomplete.
So there you have an idea of how immense Ferrovial really is.
It is incomplete but I think it is very representative.
My plan was to find and capture, to the best of my ability,
those aspects that I found to be most interesting, from an aesthetic standpoint.
There were many surprises along the way, despite my expectations.
For example, I know what airports are like because I travel a lot.
But, to go to Heathrow, and to look at it as a building, and then to look at how it functions...
These are projects that you don't see every day, whose size and significance are quite awe-inspiring.
Another example is Crossrail, an underground railway that traverses London.
These are works of tremendous complexity.
Though it was not the first boring machine I'd seen, it was still amazing.
What do you think you bring to the company and,
in particular, to the people closest to these projects, the engineers, etc.?
Just as this project has been an opportunity for me,
I would like my relationship with Ferrovial to give rise to dialogue in the world of art,
between an aesthetic vision and a scientific or technological one.
Construction and industry are completely interconnected with the ecosystem,
and many artists have used that relationship in their work.
I don't believe that anyone is a pioneer in the sense of creating something from scratch.
I think that a person is influenced by a series of factors, and his work is based on that situation,
and those factors contribute to the final outcome.
How did you approach the process with each project?
I was given a list of 35 destinations
and an immense amount of information.
So I started to think about what exactly Ferrovial is,
and I realised that it's a very complete company in the sense that it is involved in practically every aspect of human activity.
Ferrovial is involved, in one way or another, from initial conception through trouble-shooting to execution,
operation and maintenance.
It completes the entire process, which I broke down into four actions: thinking, building, using and maintaining.
So I organized myself around this idea
and I visualized what Ferrovial is: a company that thinks,
that has a team of engineers who solve problems and address new challenges.
Problems like, for example, how to build a specific kind of bridge,
which is essentially a tool that allows you to get from A to B by crossing a significant geographic obstacle.
Ferrovial sets out to solve these problems and to find the most elegant,
economical, profitable and long-lasting solution.
Then comes construction, followed by operation, and also maintenance and upkeep.
Ferrovial covers the entire cycle,
something I was surprised to discover since it went beyond the pattern that I had been accustomed to seeing.
60 views of Ferrovial. Jose Manuel Ballester, 12 June to 30 July 2013, CaixaForum Madrid