Immaterial Urban Space
a series of photographic works on archival paper, various formats, 2014
Immaterial Urban Space is a series of photographic works that explores the multi-sensory experience of Barcelona. Created during the Doroszenko duo’s artistic residency at Fundació AAVC Hangar, the cycle was inspired by sound recordings of the urban environment collected by Jacek Doroszenko. Working solely from the audio material – without knowing the specific locations from which the sounds originated – Ewa Doroszenko sought to translate the ephemeral and ambiguous character of the recorded soundscapes into a visual form.
In this series, the artist combines digital and analogue techniques, including photography, scanography, digital image deconstruction and collage-like juxtapositions of architecture, textures and found details. She operates through fragmentation and layering: realistic elements intertwine with abstract forms, creating a visual equivalent of a dispersed, immaterial urban topography. This is not a map of Barcelona, but rather a collage of impressions, memories and traces.
Natural, architectural and figural motifs appear in deconstructed and transformed forms – deprived of linear narrative, functioning instead as overlapping layers of perception. Doroszenko employs a broad spectrum of contrasts: smooth surfaces collide with visible raster, sharp contours blur, and realistic fragments undergo distortions reminiscent of digital transmission errors.
This formal approach reflects the contemporary, technologically mediated experience of space – fragmented, hybrid and unstable – where nature, architecture and the human figure coexist within a single frame. In Immaterial Urban Space, Ewa Doroszenko does not document the city; she constructs a visual–sonic metaphor of it, articulated through a distinctly contemporary graphic language.
Photos from the exhibition Ewa Doroszenko and Jacek Doroszenko, Exercises of listening, Fait Gallery, Brno (CZ), 2016
