VAT. Guillem de Castro, 118
The IVAM has brought a volcano. Rather the lava. You will find it in the room that the museum dedicates to the site specific from different artists from the Spanish territory, in this case from Lara from Zaragoza Almarcegui, an artist who at the Venice Biennale 2013 filled the Spanish pavilion with the same materials that were used to build it, leaving it in a state of ruin. Almarcegui try to understand where it is, what are you stepping on, What is the space around you made of?. That's why, to execute this IVAM assignment, He began by investigating the Valencian territory and discovered that two million years ago there was a volcano erupting in Cofrentes and that there is still hot magma there. 15 kilometers deep, hence the hot springs in the area. The Agras volcano has some iron, but above all lava that was extracted by the cement industry in the years 70 to manufacture construction materials until the deposits are practically exhausted. And here appears one of the artist's great passions precisely, study where construction materials come from. The artistic project of Almarcegui has consisted of piling up on the ground floor of the living room 25 tons of lava, already crushed and finite, and document in the silver above how he obtained the mining rights to the volcano. That is to say, on a portion of land that extends from the subsoil to the very center of the earth, according to mining law. We can also see a video that explains the mining law and the history of the volcano., and drawings associated with the geological studies that were done at the time on the ground and appreciate how, year after year, the lava layer useful for industry (darker) was decreasing. The new IVAM exhibition reaches very low to ask ourselves and ask ourselves: What do we have underneath? Who organizes the property? S.M.
