Jorge Yeregui’s exhibition “Deshacer, borrar, acticar” (To undo, to erase, to activate) proves that landscape can be political. Through the lens of the title verbs, the artist explores the naturalization of a stretch of land north of Barcelona. The easternmost point of the Iberian Peninsula, Cap de Creus was home to a Club Méditerranée resort from 1961 until the early 2000s. It has since been converted into a nature preserve.

Yeregui follows the process of rewilding with VACÍOS (Deshacer), (Voids [Undo], all works 2018), four photographs of newly vacated spots in the landscape hung above four stacks of posters. The variety and fullness of the terrain in these wastelands, as captured in the photographs, is counterpointed by the images in the posters, which show the floor of a dock that had been built from the repurposed rubble of the Club Med. The triptych EXÓTICA, INVASORA (Borrar) (Exotic, Invasive [Erase]) depicts withered, nonnative plants, visualizing the aggravated extinction of invasive species in order to wipe all traces of human activity from the environment.

The landscape architects took a mimetic approach to transforming the park, blending in new “native” plants and terraforming. Within the six pigment print diptychs AUTÓCTONA (Activar) (Native [Activate]) and the sixteen individual photographs of DESDE, HACIA (Activar) (From, Toward [Activate]), Yeregui documents how this stretch of “natural” earth has been constructed by the same means as the tourist landscape before it. There could be no stronger illustration of what anthropologist Anna Tsing calls “life in the ruins of capitalism.”

— Franz Thalmair