Jose Carlos Soto

Carpa 1588, presents photographs taken in the city of Barcelona between 2000 and 2011. This time, for this reason, I have preferred to focus on art and artistic interventions rather than on its architecture, this remains, on this occasion, in the background, but It has always been the protagonist in most of my photographic work.

Let us, on this occasion, let Paquita be the one to welcome us to this new stage:

As all our readers know, Soto promised to carry out a series of light editions of Carpa dedicated to summarizing part of her work in the field of photography and 3d design. The first of these numbers should have appeared in the first weeks of this spring but unforeseen events prevented our author from starting the selection for these volumes and all of us, in the editorial office, gave up on the projects as lost.
Unexpectedly, at the beginning of this month of July, I received an email from Soto announcing me and attaching a sketch of the specimen that I present in this intro. The artist seemed to have forgotten everything that had been planned in last year's meetings and he gave me a superb and brief project dedicated to exploring the urban landscape of the city of Barcelona in the first decade of the 2000s. Although he does not now reside in the metropolis, he considered that it was the right time to walk again, like so many times in the past, through the streets and neighborhoods of his hometown. I could have theorized and inquired in more detail about the reasons for this change, but seeing the feverish activity and strange happiness to which the artist had surrendered, with the approval of our director, I preferred to take charge of the direction of this Tent together with Soto as I have done in other numbers of the series and forget everything else.
That is if, unlike in other editions, Soto stops at the small corners of the city and leaves aside the great buildings that were beginning to rise in those years. Anonymous and colorful artistic interventions will be the protagonists of this Carpa 1588 and these spectacular constructions, at the time they were, will become a suitable stage for our unexpected walk through the streets of the big city.
This has been the first issue of the Carpa series in which the author has been more directly involved in the design of this issue. Although as always, he has left total aesthetic freedom to this wording if, for the first time, he has insisted on controlling the original scheme without interference.
Soto has included an intro that is remote, for me, conceptually from the project, but that according to his own words prologues and adequately presents these photographs taken between 2000 and 2011. Perhaps Soto, with this cryptic charade built around a fragmented dialogue, incomprehensible , and clipped poetic interferences, reflects the feelings that led him to make this series of photographs or, simply, disguises the reality of that and this time with enigmatic aesthetic fireworks that dazzle the reader and prepare him for what is to come. The apparent and usual chaos of him appears, already, in these first pages. On the one hand, he has selected some of the photographs taken of someone from his circle of friends who also appeared in Carpa 1812 and Carpa 1943, of whom we only know his name without further details, and confronts them in a disconcerting visual dialogue with a unique architectural photography and various artistic interventions carried out on the walls of the city, renouncing, in them, any spatial or temporal reference. However, he insisted that this editorial intro be integrated into his prologue and he personally chose the photographs that would accompany it and would complete it, before closing it, with a double-page photograph, thus beginning our journey.
We have greatly enjoyed the work to prepare this edition. Intense and fun have been our editorial boards when commenting on the photographs, poems and sketches that Soto sent us, even by post, day after day. On this occasion, for this reason, we have preferred to remain on the sidelines and limit ourselves to accompanying the author in the construction of his project and allowing the apparent chaos that blurs the real intentions of the artist when designing this volume, to take over Carpa 1588 .