Fieldwork

Job Ramos
Works Fieldwork Bio Contact

Otro paraíso sin alcantarillado (Another Paradise Without Sewage) (2008) is an intervention by Job Ramos that consists of uprooting a tree from a forest and relocating it inside an exhibition space. The gesture reveals the contradiction between contemplating nature and exerting control over it. The work questions the idea of paradise as a pure space, suggesting that without structures of care (the “sewer system”), even the ideal can become unsustainable. Ramos transforms a minimal action into a reflection on the limits between the natural and the artificial, and on how we relate to the environment from within this interstice.

The act of uprooting a tree from its natural surroundings and placing it in a white — controlled, artificial — room becomes a gesture charged with ethical and aesthetic implications. Decontextualized, the tree turns into a kind of living reliquary, making visible the conflict between the natural world and its domestication by human beings. With this work, Ramos not only physically displaces a fragment of landscape, but also addresses the viewer directly: is it possible to relocate a piece of forest without altering it? What happens when nature becomes an object of artistic contemplation?

Staring at the Sun Was Extremely Painful (2011) is a project that reflects on the impossibility of controlling that which, by its very nature, escapes all forms of domination: light, air, time. Through a sensitive inquiry into these intangible elements, Ramos develops a series of works that function as manuals or scores, inviting the viewer into a direct perceptual experience beyond the visual or the narrative.

The project unfolds through a logic of minimal intervention, identifying and activating voids or invisible structures within the exhibition space. In this way, the work does not represent; it invokes. By altering the luminous and temporal experience of the space—rather than imposing a closed form—Ramos opens up the possibility of contact with the elusive, with that which cannot be fully fixed or named.

Through the superimposition of natural and artificial light, and the subtle modulation of spatial perception, the exhibition becomes a cartography of the imperceptible: an exercise in attention to the sensible that transforms perception itself into artistic material.

A la intemperie (Out in the Open) (2021), produced in collaboration with scientist Fina Torres, is a research-based film that explores an artificial ecosystem located within a wildlife recovery center, where a team of biologists works on the conservation of an endangered species.

Far from the conventions of documentary cinema, the piece adopts a contemplative rhythm and delves into the tension between the natural and the artificial, questioning the limits of human control over ecosystems. Conceived as a sensory experience rather than a narrative one, A la intemperie proposes a poetics of attention and fragility, articulating a form of cinema that observes, listens, and accompanies rather than explains.

Atender un fuera de tiempo (Attending to an Untimely Outside) (2023) consists of the relocation of an ecosystem through cinema: the displacement of a wetland area to a wildlife recovery center (Astacifactoria del Molí de les Fonts). The animals housed at the center cannot inhabit this aquatic ecosystem—their original habitat—because it is contaminated by a fungus lethal to their survival. Faced with this impossibility, the relocation is conceived as an intervention through art, operating where science has been unable to intervene.

Conceived as a site-specific film—eight hours in duration—and addressed to other species—the non-human inhabitants of the center—it is screened at night on a large-format projection installed within the space. Filmed in the wetlands of La Moixina (Girona), Atender un fuera de tiempo, through extended long takes and a contemplative aesthetic, exceeds human attention, moving away from conventional narrative to propose a sensory, almost ritual experience.

Rather than narrating, the work invites a vigil: to observe with care a disappearing landscape and to rethink our relationship with the living through a shared and decelerated attention.

In parallel, a stage adaptation of the site-specific film was developed for a human audience, reducing its duration from eight hours to two. The intervention places the audience on stage, confronting them with a nature mediated through images: invited to contemplate the movement of water, the flow of the river, through cinema.

The screening is contextualized through punctual actions within the space, live subtitling, and moments of dialogue unfolding around the images. This adaptation for humans does not seek to reproduce the original film, but rather to explore how perception itself can become a performative practice.

125 pliegues (1878–2025) (125 Folds) is a first prototype of an audiovisual herbarium. In it, we observe an adolescent in an ascetic environment handling a nineteenth-century herbarium.

The audiovisual herbarium is a counter-natural format: instead of preserving vegetation through paper and dried plants, it does so through movement and light. In 125 pliegues (1878–2025), art becomes a device for improbable encounters: a teenager engaging with a nature from 150 years ago that no longer exists.

As if a giant from the future were stirring a forest from the past—yet outside of time.

Job Ramos. 2026