Text by Jon Lopez

I often hear that London refuses to resolve into a single image, that it stays stubbornly unresolved. It is a place of permanent becoming, defined by edges and incompleteness. These photographs from Francisco Ibáñez Hantke’s Non-Structures (2023) of cranes, hoardings, tarpaulin wrapping and propped facades suggest a place in flux. A romantic might describe the visible effects of this process as something approaching ruination, but the signs aren’t accidents. The stasis captured is more often than not a site stuck – stalled by finance, bureaucracy or unfavourable market conditions. Hantke implies the slower movement the camera can’t show – the decades-long churn of land assembly and ownership. A walk down Borough High Street testifies to this: a short terrace at number 153 long since demolished around the single corner building left perilously propped. The terrace still trades at street level – an off-licence a few years ago, now a barber’s – left standing while its neighbours departed. Whilst the stillness of the picture and the implied stillness of the site might chime, they’re not the same. Ruin is really a site arrested by the abstractions of legislation and capital.

The way we build now – all supply chains and catalogue procurement – largely conceals its own assembly: plasterboard sheathing structure, hidden fixings securing exterior cladding, sealant and adhesives squeezed into gaps and fissures. What we see here is a documentation of something engineered to disappear. Hantke smuggles meaning into a condition that the construction programme treats as transitional irritation. What’s kept in the demolition is what can be valued – frontage, heritage and any vestiges of the original building, counted as a gain for planners, while everything behind that value is stripped. The building isn’t losing its identity so much as being reduced to it: new bones, old clothes. A building under construction is placeless, anonymised by the uniform skin of sheeting and temporary hoarding. Yet it is precisely that interim moment that reveals how it stands: a ruin running backwards, held in an indefinite stasis. .