What is Valladolid made of? Where do the construction materials for your buildings – current and old – come from? It was from this principle that Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972) began to design “Gravas Arenas”, an “ambitious” project carried out by Patio Herreriano with which the museum offers “an alternative look at the design of architecture”, underlined Javier Hontoria during his presentation. In the exhibition, the Spanish artist residing in Rotterdam focuses on her critical look at the consequences of construction and the quantity of materials necessary for each architectural action.
Almarcegui said that to develop it, she first met several times with geologists, urban planners, stonecutters… With them she visited the gravel and sand extraction areas of the province, a documentation work from which she came out “impressed”, because she realized that On the banks of the Pisuerga and Duero rivers “there were an enormous number of gravel pits”: “According to the inventories of the Geological Institute of Mines, in the 80s, in the province, 118 were recorded,” he detailed, citing among them the one located in Pinar del Jalón, where he concentrated his project to know “as much as possible” of the terrain and “understand everything”.
The result of his research can be seen in the guide ‘Descampado Pinar del Jalón’, one of the projects which was designed specifically for the Valladolid museum and which joins other guides on areas in transformation which can be seen in room 1 of it. The artist recounts the history of these lands and the plans that successive municipal governments designed around them, as well as his status as a witness to the growth of the city that surrounds him. During a press conference, Lara Almarcegui explained that He considers these open fields “not” as “holes in the city, but as “places in themselves”. with their own nature and which “allow activities that the rest of the city does not have. » Architecture rationalizes, imposes, controls… When there is none, there are other possibilities. This is why the Pinar del Jalón wasteland is so interesting,” he reflected.
In Room 1 you can also see the action carried out by Almarcegui at the Gros Market, in San Sebastián, before its demolition, as well as several of his projects to calculate the weight of cities and buildings – the city of Sao Paulo and The Among them, the Spanish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, whose numbers are displayed in lists arranged on the walls. The objective, he explained, is to recall that “architecture has a materiality”. “I remember that when I was a student, in the 90s, people said that architecture was light, it was air… That seemed to me a big mistake, a superficiality,” he said. he noted, recalling that the material used in construction is made from minerals generated two million years ago “which will never be recovered again”.
This critical look at the impact of architecture and urban planning in a city, in this case in Valladolid, also emerges from the work carried out in the museum chapel, “Limestone”, in which Lara Almarcegui refers to the geological origin of architecture. The installation is the result of another very common practice for her, she says: slowing down the production rate of a quarry. As a result of this “break”, he obtained a set of large blocks of limestone which, in this case, came from Campaspero and which were “fundamental in the construction of the city”, since he recalled that the museum itself was made of her. “It’s about giving importance to the material,” he reflected.
In the adjacent room, room 9, the visitor can see another result of this practice in a video that documents another recent action of the artist in which a gravel pit in La Planta del Corb, in Lleida, was paralyzed during a production day. The exhibition is completed by a selection made in room 2 of the projects carried out by Almarcegui for the management and negotiation of mining rights contracts, in which the mining authorities gave the artist authorization to explore deposits of iron. As detailed, the purpose of obtaining these rights is none other than to block extraction and thus be able to reflect on what is under our feet.
