Lara Almarcegui
Date: 27 October 2011 - 12 February 2012
Exhibition Session: Margin and City

Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972) documents wastelands and ruins in the contemporary city and brings them back into the public eye, compiling a catalogue that she uses to address the changes taking place and thus inverting the usual urban development process, which tends towards renovation or definition, to instead allow the public to determine the use and significance of these vacant spaces. This working process is clearly documented in her guides to the wastelands of São Paulo and London.

In the artist's opinion, "the most interesting thing about wastelands is that they are among the few places in the city that weren't created by design [...] they're places where almost anything is possible because there's nothing there". With this idea in mind, Almarcegui has worked to draw public attention to these wastelands and even managed to obtain protected status for some, such as the vacant lot on the banks of the Ebro (2009).

Almarcegui is also interested in researching and investigating cities, their uses and potentialities, and she systematically measures and analyses the materials and weights of different buildings. This is best exemplified by the series Materiales de construcción (Construction Materials), where the elements and quantities that make up cities like Burgos, Dijon or Sao Paulo are set out like ingredients in a cooking recipe.

In connection with the abovementioned themes, the artist also creates performances in which she dismantles and assembles elements of constructions to learn about the space and the structure, in a dynamic comparable to the life cycle of cities themselves. One such performance is Removal of the Wooden Floor, Grafisches Kabinett, Secession, Vienna.

On the occasion of this exhibition, Almarcegui decided to get involved with the local context and paid a working visit to the future aquarium of Seville, where construction work has been brought to a halt.

ADDITIONAL DOCUMENTATION

[Press Dossier. PDF File: 100kb]

[High Resolution Images]