Home Less by Nelson Garrido
“Home Less” is a project that explores spaces that were left abandoned through time, questioning their existence.
I’ve been photographing spaces that, because they were abandoned or unfinished, make us look at them and question their existence or even their right to occupy a space in the city. Walking on these ruins I felt like if they were unreal, as if time had stopped. I often saw animals, like hares, walking around. Wild plants use windows to invade the interiors, like children when they climb to enter their houses.
Usually I say that this project started about 25 years ago. There was a time when I travelled a lot to a little village in the interior of Portugal. I always passed by a place where an abandoned house kept standing on the top of a small hill meters above the street. This unexpected scenario always intrigued me and I always wanted to photograph it, but I never found the proper way to do it.
This project goes beyond the revelation of ruins; it intends to provide an experience of places.
These constructions – which could be thousands of others – are life projects, sometimes unfinished, abandoned, dark places in a desolate territory, that embrace them as wounds, and that are rotting and transforming the cities.
With the beginning of the real estate crises, construction of new houses almost stopped and a lot of constructions were left unfinished. Other, which were actually completed, were never occupied or sold.
In these buildings, there’s a light that reminds us the difference between what reality is and what it should be, and that is no more than a metaphor of the lives interrupted.
The human element is present in the simulacrum, in the light that is life and, at the same time, paradoxically, that inhabits the unoccupied.
Can this light represent existence?
Is this a game between reality and simulation?