Asturias is black and green. It is said in traditional songs and poems. The former due to the coal, the later due to its exuberant nature. Now most of the coalmines are closed and their buildings remain silent, quiet like skeletons, casting a long dark shadow on the land that not long ago would bustle around them.
For the last two decades the region has been immersed in an unfinished and unsuccessful process of reindustrialisation which has added nothing but another colour to the canvas; a faded grey that gets everywhere. It is the grey of the ruins from the past, stubborn reminders of prosperous times that fall apart patiently. It is in the new roads and pavements that get to the same places but in a different way, with a different pace. And it is the colour of concrete, omnipresent in uncompleted buildings and empty homes, ruins of the present that observe, in silence, those who will neither finish nor live in them.
Among those ruins people live in a limbo where time has seemed to freeze, nothing seems to change. They are trapped between a vanishing lifestyle at which they cannot look back and an uncertain future they cannot envisage, their paths going astray before their eyes as if a dense fog covered everything. A fog that at times seems grey too. This project is also a book: http://issuu.com/naomisoto/docs/black_asturias_a_future_in_ruins?e=9396506/4959276
