A few steps away to. . . SPAIN

  We  are now in the Spanish Pavilion  featuring artist Lara Almarcegui. Her artwork  stems from a heightened awareness of the city, using its wastelands and buildings to reflect on the evolution of the city itself and the elements that comprise it. Almarcegui brought two related projects to the Italian exhibition that continue in the same line as her previous works. One tackles the physical space of the Spanish Pavilion in the Giardini, while the other explores an empty plot of land beside the island of Murano.

In the pavilion a large sculpture installation interacts with the architecture of the building constructed by Javier de Luque in 1922, occupying the entire interior. This intervention consists of mounds of different construction materials, of the same type and quantity used by workers to construct this very building in the early 20th century.

The installation revolves around a huge mountain of cement rubble, roofing tiles and bricks smashed to gravel which occupies the central room, making it virtually impossible to enter this space directly. Other lesser mounds, each of a different material (sawdust, glass and a blend of iron slag and ashes), were located in the side rooms, which visitors are able to walk through and so circle around the large central mound.

With regard to her project, Almarcegui explains, “The materials are the rubble from demolitions which, after being recycled, have been transformed into gravel by means of the treatment process currently used in Venice.”

The artist’s idea is to make people look at the city, its wastelands and its buildings through mountains of rubble so that they can reflect on the evolution of the city and its component parts. Almarcegui said " it explains the idea of a building’s ingredients. I have used this idea to present the pavilion before it was built and how it would look if it was destroyed. It’s a sculpture that speaks about volume and that also refers to the future of construction”. Edition 55 of the Biennale, entitled “Il Palazzo enciclopedico” (‘the Encyclopaedic Palace), also features  another work by Almarcegui, “Guía de la Sacca San Mattia, la isla abandonada de Murano, Venecia”, an investigation into an abandoned island formed from glass waste from the Murano glass-making industry.  Lara’s work  represents essential problems of the world we are living in.