Chloe Dewe Mathews

For a Few Euros More explores the landscape surrounding the Tabernas Desert in southern Spain, merging together the region’s multi-layered history with the contemporary moment. Through the use of still and moving image Chloe Dewe Mathews’ work interrogates the industry and labour of modern agriculture, highlighting issues around food production and consumption, human exploitation, and the unfolding environmental crisis.

Her practice explores ways in which photography can project the past onto the present, allowing for time to be expanded and contracted and multiple narratives to be explored side by side. The project For a Few Euros More is rooted in the local landscape, highlighting three overlapping yet unlikely sites which characterise the area: the agricultural polytunnels, an abandoned mine and the deserted film sets of the Spaghetti Westerns. Although unlikely bedfellows, the histories and narratives of these three sites (located in close proximity to each other) are intertwined through the overarching need to monetise the landscape and natural resources. Seen here in perhaps its most unsustainable form, the area is fraught with a history of a boom and bust economy. The result of which is a landscape littered with decaying relics of past economic miracles.

Excerpt from catalogue essay by Shoair Mavlian