With this exhibition the Museo Universidad de Navarra and MACBA investigate the potential of photography as tool for a new reading of recent history, showing themes that invite us to reflect on our immediate environment. Nitrate is the central axis of the exhibition, which also presents a selection of the projects carried out by Xavier Ribas during the last decade, such as the pieces Concrete Geographies (Ceuta and Melilla), from the Tender Bridges program of the University Museum of Navarra.

The exhibition of Xavier Ribas (Barcelona, 1960) presents us through Nitrate a project in which he exposes the political geography of the Atacama Desert and the history of the extraction of this mineral. With the financial aid of a series of works: photographic polyptychs, texts and videos, Ribas displays a research in which photography, more than a documentary support, becomes an object of reflection.

Through the inspection of places, artifacts and images, the project traces the route of nitrate, a traditional component of fertilizers and explosives, in the genealogical line of the exploitation and appropriation of non-renewable resources that define the process of globalization. The work sample its natural state, the subsequent processing in the offices of the Atacama Desert, the transportation of the product to be sold, and its symbolic value in the mansions of London and its surroundings.

This exhibition is theresult of several years of research at partnership with the University of Brighton and the holding of the seminar "Nitrate Traces" in which the results were released.

The pieces "Geografías concretas (Ceuta y Melilla)", created by the photographer Xavier Ribas and present in the collection of the Museo Universidad de Navarra, will be exhibited at MACBA as part of the sample Nitrate. A total of 48 photographs, divided into two pieces are those from the MUN collection that travel to be exhibited in Barcelona along with other works by the photographer and researcher. These pieces are statements towards a political cartography of the border fences of Ceuta and Melilla as the very edge of Europe. These two fences are, perhaps, contemporary public works that can be defined as monuments to inequality in the European landscape of the 21st century.