During the summer of 2011, I travelled to Madrid to conduct a workshop I called Experiments in Infrastructural Ontography, as part of the Visualizar program at Medialab Prado. I had activated this obscure term ontography, the “photography of being,” the summer before for a workshop in Montreal. It is bit of a paradox: on the one hand, we can not help but photograph being, as everything in the world we can photograph is—that is, is a being. On the other hand, it would seem impossible to photograph being itself: where would we find and how would we record that? The term “infrastructural ontography,” however, begins to point to its meaning, as that which supports being. This was the conceit, which related to the theme of the Visualizar workshop, “Understanding Infrastructure.”

Arriving in Madrid, I took the bus to Puerta del Sol, the main plaza in the city and the point by which all major radial roads in Spain are measured. What I saw when I got there was an infrastructural cacophony of pitched tents and makeshift buildings strewn over the entire plaza. It was where protesters decided to camp following a march contesting the economic policy of austerity. Puerta del Sol became the offices and residences of what became known as Movimiento 15M, named for the day it began, the 15th of May 2011

Our group of collaborators explored a diverse range of visualization strategies and media, from the use of geolocation data, documents provided by the organizers of the 15-M movement , as well as photographic documentation; and produced pictures, words and data in a wide range of forms.

I spent much of the time during the workshop as I generally do in most cities I first visit, photographing—or ontographing: being-in-the-city, photographing. When one is new to a city, one tends to be aware of elements of its infrastructure which residents, more often than not, take for granted, inured as they are by daily habit.

There are many kinds of infrastructures, from water pipes and electrical generation plants, to things less obvious—like the cultural baggage a tourist brings to a place, or an austerity regime that whole economies rely on to enforce stability. I brought my own infrastructures with me to Madrid—assumptions, habits, practices—which I relied on as I traipsed around the city, meandering and photographing. These photographs are the result.