Exhibitions
Martin Llavaneras and the material memory of the port
Muelle de Castilla converts the infrastructures, flows of goods and transformations of the Tarragona territory into a sculptural research on matter and time.
The port is, by definition, a place of transit. A space where materials arrive, leave, accumulate, transform and are put back into circulation. But this apparent condition of passage hides a much deeper capacity: that of altering the territory. Goods need roads, depots, ramps, conduits and storage surfaces, and each of these infrastructures leaves a physical mark on the landscape. It is precisely in this tension between circulation and sedimentation that Martin Llavaneras places Muelle de Castilla , a sculptural research that, from September 9 to November 15, 2026, occupies Les Golfes del Mèdol to approach the port of Tarragona from its material dimension.
Llavaneras starts from the port activity, but also from the particular geography of Tarragona, marked by the difference in height that separates the elevated city from the seafront. This difference in heights becomes a key to understanding a city crossed by flows of materials and by infrastructures that condition its form. The artist does not observe the port only as an industrial landscape, but as an organism in motion, a great physical machinery in which each journey produces consequences and each material leaves some kind of trace.
Curated by Freya Day and developed in collaboration with Cultura Verda, the exhibition takes the name of one of the infrastructures of the port of Tarragona and translates into sculptural language some of the logics that allow this incessant movement. The forms do not attempt to literally reproduce the port structures, but rather to understand their functioning and convert it into a sculptural grammar. Reliefs and tubular structures extend across walls and floors, adopting inclinations and routes that evoke loading ramps, tanks or driving systems.
In this process, matter ceases to be simply a physical element and becomes a form of knowledge. The surfaces of the pieces incorporate textures that refer to the materials transported by the port and the sediments that make up the coastline. The sculpture thus appears as a kind of condensed territory: a space where the shapes, textures and physical tensions allow us to intuit processes that are usually hidden behind industrial activity.
But Llavaneras's research is not limited to what can be seen. It also delves into a less obvious memory of the territory: that which is trapped in the names of places. Toponymy works as an underground archive, a cartography made of words that preserves fragments of disappeared geographies. When the landscape changes, some names survive and continue to point to what no longer exists. They are, in this sense, a kind of linguistic fossils: immaterial remains capable of keeping the memory of a previous territory active.
This same relationship between information and matter appears in the documents linked to the port's activity. Records of origins and quantities, initially conceived to order and control the movement of goods, are manipulated by the artist until they acquire a new condition. Folded, compressed and transformed, the papers cease to function as documents and become volumes, tubes and funnels. The information abandons its two-dimensional arrangement and begins to physically occupy space. It is as if the data followed the same process of transformation as the materials they describe.
One of the most suggestive aspects of Muelle de Castilla is precisely this impossibility of understanding the sculptures as finished forms. Some pieces incorporate organic materials that will continue to transform throughout the exhibition. Crystallization and degradation will progressively modify the surfaces and introduce a temporality of their own within the whole. The work thus ceases to be a fixed object and becomes a process.
This temporal dimension reinforces one of the central ideas of the project: matter is never completely stable. Neither is the territory. The port transforms the city at the same time as the goods that circulate there transform, accumulate or disappear. Llavaneras' sculptures share this same mutable condition. They sediment, erode, crystallize and change before the viewer.
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