Transitional Places: Lara Almarcegui Represented Spain At The 2013 Venice Biennale

After 2011’s successful L’Inadeguato, Lo Inadecuado, The Inadequate exhibition, the Spanish Pavilion returns, to be held once again within the Giardini della Biennale venue. Presenting her self-titled exhibition, Lara Almarcegui, examines the process of urban transformation as a result of economic, political and social change. Focusing upon wastelands, modern ruins within cities, Almercegui attempts to bring attention to these urban spaces that often escape our awareness, her reasoning being that:
‘Wastelands are important because they are the only places in the city that remain without definition. Untouched by design, everything that takes places in them happens by chance and not according to a plan … I see great value in this lack of a design, and that is why I would like to ‘preserve’ these wastelands in my works..’
Octavio Zaya, who was behind the selection of Almarcegui as Spain’s 2013 biennale representative, spoke about the reasons behind his choice, stating:
‘ … in deconstructing buildings and other landmarks and constructions, Almarcegui unravels our understanding of inhabiting, by showing the inarticulate, bare materials of which the buildings are made, or uncovering the products of recycling that they use and that they themselves, in turn, end up becoming, to get us closer to the inherently entropic nature of civilization. Ultimately, these works connect the outdoors with the indoors, and the inside with its awareness of itself, in a dialectical process of knowledge.’
Similar to her exhibition at the Biennale, Almarcegui’s previous works have consisted of a number of large-scale installations, focusing on documenting abandoned areas as a way of preservation. In 2010’s Bauschutt Hauptraum Secession – her first solo show in Vienna – Almarcegui brought together heaps of rubble collected from the grounds of the former Nordbahnhof railway station, and arranged them into piles within the Secession gallery’s main hall. While at the 2006 Sao Paulo Biennale, she presented a chart of figures that displayed the total amount of construction materials used within the city, as a way of showing what holds it all together. Almarcegui also worked upon the restoration of a market hall awaiting demolition in her native Spain, while other projects have seen her exhibiting in cities such as France, Portugal, Sweden and The Netherlands (where she currently resides).