Exhibitions
The Albufera, common territory
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the necessary declaration of the Albufera as a Natural Park. This achievement was only possible thanks to the struggles of local residents and environmentalists who, since the 1970s, had been demanding a halt to the intensification of agriculture and industry in the area, as well as the attempts at real estate speculation linked to the phenomenon of mass tourism that affected—and still affect—Spanish coastal regions since the Francoist implementation of the 1959 Stabilization Plan.
The IVAM has taken advantage of this anniversary to retrieve from its archives an interesting photographic project entitled La Albufera. Tangential Vision (1985) and to develop around it an in-depth investigation into the representation of this coastal lagoon from the mid-19th century to the present day. Based on this work, which the institution itself commissioned from twelve national and international photographers, including John Goto, Humberto Rivas, and Joan Fontcuberta, the exhibition brings together more than two hundred works and documents that create a multifaceted image of the Albufera throughout history.
Beyond the evident transformations of the landscape, this visual journey, curated by Sandra Moros, reveals a place teeming with life, but also with ruins, scars, and tensions, where the relationships between the human and the non-human, between the natural and the artificial, are intertwined. By dissecting the stereotypical image of the area as an “idealized rural paradise,” generated during the first half of the 20th century, and contrasting it with a series of later representations that, from the 1970s onward, focused on highlighting its environmental problems, the exhibition underscores the need to consider the construction of the idea of any territory through its multiple layers. History, economy, culture, environment—everything influences the configuration of a place's image.
But the IVAM's aim is not merely to interpret the various existing representations here, but to position itself as an active agent and catalyst for continuing to rethink the image of this Valencian landscape from a contemporary and post-natural perspective. Therefore, as a kind of "coda" and in a nod to the 1985 project, the exhibition concludes with six new visual essays commissioned by the institution from six contemporary Spanish artists and photographers: Bleda y Rosa, Paula García-Masedo, Lucía Loren, Teresa Marín, Jorge Ribalta, and Jorge Yeregui. Using diverse approaches and media, each artist addresses the impact of the global ecosocial crisis on the Albufera lagoon and, as with Loren's Aquatic Weavings , even ventures to imagine some of its possible futures.
In addition to the coherence of the narrative and the interesting dialogues that emerge between the historical works and the new commissions, there is, in my opinion, a third element that appears in an uncontrolled yet wonderful way in the project: the diverse audience that visits the galleries, ranging from art world experts to those entering the museum for the first time, drawn by a title that evokes the place they consider home. Each of them connects to the Albufera in a different way, and in this encounter between perspectives, memories, and ways of inhabiting the land, perhaps one of the exhibition's greatest strengths is revealed: its reclaiming of the Albufera as a shared territory.
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