L’Albufera. Visió tangencial (1985), a photographic project promoted by the regional government’s Department of Culture, entered the IVAM collection in 1986. In this commissioned project twelve selected participants — Derek Bennett, Diana Blok, Gabriel Cualladó, Vicente del Amo, Joan Fontcuberta, John Goto, Andreas Müller-Pohle, Rafael Navarro, Paulo Nozolino, Humberto Rivas, Philippe Salaün and Manuel Úbeda — were invited to work in and around the Albufera, the freshwater lagoon just outside the city of Valencia, with the freedom to choose whatever they wished and no other mandate than to take photographs of the place.
The current exhibition project wishes to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the designation of the Albufera as a Natural Park while at once proposing a reading of the territory from Jeff Kelley’s concept of place. This concept develops the idea of the Albufera as not merely a physical and geographical space, but also as a place shaped by historical, political, social, economic, cultural, and other circumstances which, like layered strata, have shaped and continue to shape the construction of this place, encouraging new interpretations and giving different meanings to the territory.
For this reason, this exhibition project intends to deconstruct and analyse Albufera, to lend visibility to the layers that form it and the forces at work within it. The approach will be based on a combination of artworks, artistic projects and documentation covering the whole of the twentieth century up until the present day. The exhibition features works by artists such as Sorolla, Gustave Doré, and María Dolores Casanova, among others. To borrow the words of Anna Tsing, the Albufera becomes a dance floor where dances respond to different lives, communities, and practices intertwine.
In this project, the museum follows a working method in which the museum becomes a proactive agent, encouraging processes of dialogue with the participating artists and activating a museum practice that intervenes, proposes and produces; so, the museum is more than a mere repository of heritage. The goal is to develop new narratives around the tangible and intangible heritage of such a complex natural environment as the Albufera through specifics artistics projects made by Bleda y Rosa, Teresa Marín, Paula García-Masedo, Jorge Yeregui, Lucía Loren and Jorge Ribalta, which will create a mesh with the rest of the artworks and documentation.
