LARA ALMARCEGUI. MADRID UNDERNEATH

28 June 2012 - 28 October 2012

Commissioned by:

Manuel

Segade

CURATOR MANUEL SEGADE

Lara Almarcegui’s (Zaragoza, 1972) projects focus on the public representation of the investigations conducted by means of a rigorous analysis methods applied on apparently peripheral aspects on the urban order. Wastelands, construction materials, layers from abandoned cities within their proper development process or whatever is underneath, are just some of the subjects introduced in Almarcegui’s work and presented herein as a retrospective contextualization of the art work specially created for CA2M entitled Madrid Underneath.

The narrative which gives shape to the exhibition is based on a repetition with certain variations: each one of the three venues of the exhibition is organized as follows: a guide book of a city wastelands, construction material of a city or of its historical center, an action of removing the ground from the exhibition venues to put it back in place once observed, and the photographic documentation from the wastelands with temporal and permanent protection achieved by the artist. This approach makes more readable the variationwithin Almarcegui methods as well as it becomes explicit the reasons that make her intervene in a site rather than in another: her projects are tools which allows representing those sites in moments of transformation or of imminent change, critical moments that translate into the museum venues through devices, which at once, are developed in time.

Among the series of posters from Almarcegui´s first project opening the exhibition, it is displayed the action Digging, consisting in initiating the physical work of excavation, as a form of performance, motivated by curiosity, by the will of knowing, by the need of knowing what is underneath. That same impulse culminates with Madrid Underground, a book accompanied by aslideshow, which describes what is under the ground of the city of Madrid. Against the preconceived notion of a stable, stony subsoil, the book narrates how the underground water circulation of the city makes the ground of Madrid unstable. Madrid subsoil is a deepness negative of the socioeconomic space of the city surface and, while hosting the infrastructures that support many of its flows: people displacement, energy and communication distribution... The project replays to that fascination for the underground as well as allows the readers to descend through a gaze at each of the underground layers they daily walk on.

Lara Almarcegui initiated in 1995 a series of projects on the peripheral contexts of built areas, places of transition between the urban design and the natural order that preceded it. From a field investigation process, she has developed methodological tools to understand the different meaning of inhabiting and she has also designed formats of presentations which by ways of guides, maps, and leaflets and by other common means from the documentation and pedagogy fields allow making public and reportable the information obtained. Hence, the notions of artwork and of viewer are transformed into project and also becoming part of it, insisting in the reality and in the timing of objects under study and in the integration of the viewer beyond the conventions of the representation venues.

The exhibition will also display some of her previous projects which will retrospectively contextualize her work, together with an specific project created specifically for this exhibition. This project consists on the publication of a book which will introduce what is beneath Madrid´s ground: there exist kind of a reverse or a negative of the metropolis in its underground, which supports it and is underneath the city. From old mines to military bunkers, from safe and secure cupboards to underground warehouses, from the underground rivers to garages, Madrid bears a parallel layer under itself which also conforms it, with its historical, archaeological, utilities, transportation, energy circulation, water pipes, and communication pipes layers, which hardly ever are revealed to pedestrians.

ARTIST

Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972) is a Spanish artist with a wide international presence. Living in Rotterdam since 1990, her projects are developed within the context of contemporary cities and their development conditions. Her guides of modern ruins from Holland or Bourgogne, from urban wasteland in London or Sao Paulo, her projects with mountain of debris in Vienne or Dijon, or about the weight of the city of San Paulo, have led her to participate in major international contemporary events in the last decade.

PUBLICATIONS