The interest of Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972) architecture is linked to its view of the space that surrounds it: “Everywhere I look, wherever I arrive, I see construction and design”. Also with the importance he gives to “materiality”. She remembers that when she was a student, in the 90s, we talked about architecture in terms of light, air… She thought it was a “very frivolous and superficial” definition because it is made of “matter and tons of weight”. “. In the recently developed project for the Patio Herreriano Museum it was proposed to know what Valladolid is made of and where the construction materials for its buildings come from. The result is “Gravel and sand”.
How was the project born?
Gravel and sand are the aggregates or components of concrete. I’m very interested in these materials and I work a lot with them. In Valladolid, due to the accumulation of sediments on the river terraces and their intense extraction, this project defines the geological and constructive situation. When I started working in the city, I didn’t know this situation existed. I understood this over time by visiting gravel pits one after another and reading the reports. That is to say, even if I accepted the happy project of having large exhibition spaces, I did it above all because an invitation like this represents an immersion in the reality of the city. If instead of offering me the Patio Herreriano they had invited me to exhibit in a garage, I would surely have accepted too.
In the 90s the material didn’t matter to anyone and that was the reason they worked with him. Contradict the architects
His interest in architecture comes from afar.
It has to do with the space around me. Everywhere I look, wherever I arrive, I see construction and design. Many artists work with what surrounds them or, let’s say, their limit, but if for many this limit is their skin, their identity with the body, for me, it is the space that surrounds them, the building. Valladolid He mentioned Miguel Fisac and said that “the concept of architecture that they had in his time made him angry.”
Could you explain it?
Fisac championed a definition of architecture that I believe came from Lloyd Wright and Buddhism, in which it was said that architecture was the air inside the walls. I understood it as a very frivolous and superficial definition, because the architecture or walls are made of materials and tons of weight that caused great pain when getting up. All you have to do is see the river terraces of Valladolid. Later I came across a bit more advanced architectural talk, which talked about the process or the liquid, but the material in the 90s didn’t matter to anyone and for me that was the reason why I worked with him, to bore and contradict architects. My opposition to construction since a young age is not only to provoke, but because the materials interest me, just like the soils they destroy.
You carry out your work in different phases: you analyze the environment, you document yourself… But when does the artistic act begin for you?
When I visit extraction sites, I don’t think about what my project is going to be, but instead focus on understanding what is happening in each location. These are very interesting investigations because I learn how space is generated, but they hurt because I spend a lot of time on often illegal extraction sites. Weeks later, when I start to know what I want to do and the practical consequences of quite complicated projects present themselves to me, I worry. When I start to be afraid of my own projects, things get interesting. In the end, I defend projects that I know will probably not allow me to achieve them, but I propose them, in case they do happen. This is how all the projects visible in this exhibition were carried out: burying a house, accumulating gravel on the Basel square, protecting open fields, obtaining mining rights…
How did you approach a space as special as the Capilla del Herreriano to develop “Caliza”?
I didn’t want to pay attention to the spiritual component because it doesn’t interest me. I immediately began a research process which consisted of asking the experts the following question: where do Valladolid’s construction materials come from? The second step was to see the places where limestone, gravel and sand are extracted and to witness the enormous destruction of moorland and rivers that the extraction has generated. I began to understand issues in the territory of Valladolid that I did not know before and which posed problems on which I could continue to work.
His other project carried out for the museum refers to the wasteland of Pinar del Jalón. What attracted you to this space?
Its wasteland is one of many areas of the Duero and Pisuerga terraces and its in-depth study has been a means of understanding the dynamics of extraction along these rivers. The Pinar del Jalón was exploited as a gravel pit in the 1970s to extract aggregates and build the roads necessary for the successive southward expansions of a growing city.
He has repeatedly stated that he seeks to learn from the places where he works rather than transform them. What did your research in Valladolid show you?
How the river terraces were completely transformed into this axis, how the existence of land is impossible without the appearance of the city’s great bourgeois families, millers, land exploiters, railway shareholders… who have bought and sold land by exploiting it for construction, while the government supported them by installing infrastructure. With limestone I see a capital which has been destroyed by extracting and destroying its soil and whose fall is accelerating by selling at low prices its wastelands and its subsoils which are five to nine million years old.
The exhibition also devotes space to his work managing and negotiating mining rights contracts. How did your fascination with the underground begin?
The subsoil is the real, material and economic base that supports us and it is the one that we talk little about. I always wanted to know more. I started with digging projects that went further to obtaining mineral rights. In the basement there is what we don’t know about the city: the infrastructure, the victims, the losers, the geology, the materials that are extracted to serve us, the water, the minerals… reality underneath there are many elements which, if you analyze carefully and you understand how they work – from the technical level to the legal level or to the composition – you understand how they are secretly structured. My books about the underground of cities – like “Madrid Subterráneo” (2012) – can be read as “thrillers”, but they are not fiction, but rather the reality in which we live, which sustains us and does not is not told to us. .
He went to Holland over twenty years ago for training and continues to work there. What brought you there?
I arrived in Amsterdam invited by the wonderful utopian school of Ateliers, founded by great artists of the 60s, where I now teach. In this school, I learned to concentrate on my work without worrying about what the public or the market expects from an artist. Holland gave me time to experiment, fail and concentrate, especially thanks to the relaxed accommodation situation. I moved to Rotterdam, attracted by the port and the interesting spatial void it leaves. surrounded by demolitions from which I learned a lot.
What references influenced you during your training?
Rather than following the doctrines of minimalism, my work developed by observing the building demolitions of Gordon Matta Clark and confronting the pseudo-mystical masculine visions of space that came to me from the London School of Architecture. Madrid. When I was studying, there were impressive writers who weren’t read in Spain, like Rebecca Solnit. Also the philosopher Simone Weil, whom I found late, or even Mierle Laderman Ukeless.-
Do you have thorns in you because of impossible projects?
Since 2019, when I learned that construction sand was being extracted from the bottom of the North Sea, I have been offering sand mountain installations brought in by a dredger ship. The project could not be carried out in Aarhus, nor in Lisbon when I proposed it with sand dredged from the Tagus. I keep trying. For me, persistence is an important work tool and, even if the projects don’t succeed, I learn.
