Lara Almarcegui
In spite of her towering presentation at the Spanish pavilion at last year’s Venice Biennale, where she introduced huge piles of materials that had exactly the same weight as the ones that made up the building, or her 2012 exhibition at Track in Ghent, Belgium, a similarly overwhelming project—a mountain of seven hundred cubic meters of cement—Lara Almarcegui’s work is essentially discreet and overtly unmonumental. Since the mid-1990s, she has taken a truly personal stance on architecture. Her interest lies in anonymous spaces, those that will always be ignored by the branding ambitions of capitalist societies, but which allow for a more intimate understanding of cities—and specifically of the ways in which that we construct and interact within social space and in which time runs through it.
Almarcegui’s recent show in Madrid, “Por Debajo” (Underneath), consisted of two new works that convey her profound commitment to research and reveal the depth and intensity of her experiences on-site—for all her projects are devoted to the specificity of their contexts. Take, for instance Buried House, Dallas, 2013 a project realized with the support of Nasher Sculpture Center. On the outskirts of Dallas, she found a detached house that was to be demolished. There is nothing unusual about demolishing a house, but then she buried the building in the spot where it had previously stood. Almarcegui had not used video before this project, but no other tool could have captured so well the temporality of the work (in terms of both process and narrative). Within the span of seven minutes, the footage shows a bulldozer burying the house, leaving behind a subtle bump in the ground that suggests a grave. But since we know what was once there, does this protuberance not also suggest the place where a seed is buried, from which another building might suddenly flourish? Shall it not unexpectedly be brought to life? This duality between what might be emerging and what could be declining is common in Almarcegui’s work, as could be observed in Venice, where the piles might have been materials ready for use or, on the contrary, debris to be carted away. The time span in her work reveals the ambivalence of her take on architecture as it is inescapably attached to the realm of the living. It all comes down to the basics: People inhabit architecture. Architecture inhabits the earth. People come and go, and so does architecture. It has always been like this and will always be.
Rocks of Spitsbergen Island (Svalbard), 2014, is one of her listings of the elements that compose buildings, cities, or, as is the case here, islands. This is one of her signature deadpan formal solutions, and one cannot help but think of Dan Graham’s Schema (March 1966) when looking at these lists. However, Almarcegui cleverly twists Conceptual art’s dry self-reflexivity to point to the vicissitudes of life. Deeply interested in geology, the artist visited the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, on the very northern end of Europe, where the only activity is provided by a mining compound. The listing, in vinyl lettering on a wall, details the precise quantities of the rocks that form the island. This apparently expressionless presentation reveals a stark contrast to Almarcegui’s concerns with the transformative potential of places and their effect on people’s lives. But here, too, she tacitly points to the shady geopolitical structures that keep the mine in operation. It is her earnest methodology to seize the ever-changing reality of places.