Industry. Matrices, threads and sounds is a hybrid proposal that is situated between the creation of an archive and an artistic project. Its objective is to offer a necessarily partial reading of Valencian industrial heritage based on the sound, the intangible and social movements. The proposal is developed through the compilation of sounds, processes, images, videos, music, art pieces and discourses linked to factories in their original context of use, but also in their abandonment and their conversion into heritage spaces. Industry focuses particularly on the proactive uses of industrial heritage driven by citizens.

In addition to the archive and the meetings (called matrices) to debate and reflection, an exhibition will be open with the materials and results of the research in May at IVAM. This exhibition is conceived as a museographic adaptation of the archive, inspired by Rodchenko’s «Worker’s Club».

Industry. Matrices, threads and sound is a process of memory that remains open to negotiation and new readings. The project is positioned outside the romanticizing image of industrial ruin. Understanding heritage and history as living processes that allow us to generate conceptual tools to understand the past, present and future of the history of labor and its relationship with culture. The proposal is developed by Lorenzo Sandoval, artist and curator, and Tono Vizcaíno, archaeologist and heritage manager.

The elements that make up this archive come from numerous personal and institutional archives: Salomé Moltó (CNT), Floreal Rodríguez de la Paz (CNT), Josep Fuster, Edurne Vaello, Nando Hervido, Damià Llorens / We Are not Brothers, Arxiu Municipal d’Alcoi, Universitat Politècnica de València – Campus d’Alcoi, Club d’Amigues i Amics de la Unesco d’Alcoi, Radio Alcoy, Vicent Cortés, Ateneu Cultural El Panical, Josep Tormo Colomina, Alcoy Industrial, Fani Grande, CCOO Camp de Morvedre – Alt Palància, Fundació de la Comunitat Valenciana de Patrimoni Industrial i Memòria Obrera de Port de Sagunt, Vic Pereiró, Miguel Ángel Martín, AMIMO – Associació Memòria Industrial i Moviment Obrer, Maria Hebenstreit, César Novella, Sagunt Territori Acústic, Arxiu Municipal de Sagunt, Arxiu Històric de CCOOPV «José Luis Borbolla», El Punt – Espai de Lliure Aprenentatge, Miguel Molina, Laboratorio de Creaciones Intermedia, Departament d’Escultura de la Facultat de Belles Arts de la Universitat Politècnica de València, Alfonso Civantos / Komakino / Subsist Records, José Miguel Requena Roselló / Excesivo.net, Txuki, Colectivo APA, Colectivo La Flem, Colectivo Resiste, Fran Lenaers, Für alle Fälle, José Azkárraga, Víctor Algarra y Paloma Berrocal, Diana Sánchez Mustieles, APIVA – Associació de Patrimoni Industrial Valencià, Cor de cambra Ad Libitum de l’Escola Coral Veus Juntes, Ajuntament de Quart de Poblet, Institut Valencià de Cultura de la Generalitat Valenciana, Josep Vicent Frechina, Biblioteca Històrica de la Universitat de València, Biblioteca Valenciana «Nicolau Primitiu», Arxiu de la Democràcia y Fonoteca de la Universitat d’Alacant, Arxiu Històric Provincial d’Alacant, CanPop – Cançoner Popular Valencià, Teresa Lanceta, Coral Tabaquera Alicantina, Francisco Moreno, Vicent Oncina, Manuel Carreres, Biblioteca de la Universitat Jaume I de Castelló, Arxiu Municipal d’Onda, Museu del Taulell d’Onda “Manolo Safont”, Caixa Popular d’Onda, Fundació Caixa Benicarló, Manel Francesc Navarro i del Alar, Alejandro Torres Tomás, Pilar Beltrán, Museu de Ceràmica de l’Alcora, Juan Carlos Olària, Fundación Centro Etnográfico «Joaquín Díaz» de la Diputación de Valladolid, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, e IVAM.

Lola Lasurt’s exhibition Cardiograma suggests various reflections on the recent past through a sculpture of a woman called “democracy” and two series of images projected on zinc plates or painted by the artist and arranged on each floor of the gallery.

Like an amateur historian, the artist recomposes various elements to construct a narrative with multiple meanings. The story has two beginnings. The first is a visit to the Museo del Gremi Artesà de Fallers, a museum in Valencia’s Ciutat Fallera district, and an encounter with a figure made for a Falla, possibly a ninot spared from the flames, called “democracy”. Made by José Azpeitia, perhaps in the early eighties, it is a life-size nude figure of a young woman lying face up with her eyes closed. The patina of dark paint that covers the fibreglass piece imitates the bronze finish of funerary sculptures. She appears to be dead, but her placid face invites us to think that perhaps she is only asleep. For the exhibition, the artist has collaborated with the school of the Grau Superior de Formació Professional d’Artista Faller i Construcció d’Escenografies, the guild of Falla artists, also based in Ciutat Fallera. The students have made a crochet cushion to support, hold, protect and care for the figure of “democracy”.

Projected onto zinc plates on the surrounding frieze are various images from family archives, made available by the Film Archive of the Institut Valencià de Cultura. Recorded between the 1950s and the 1970s, the images show different pyrotechnic displays like disparás, mascletás, cordás and santotomás. They represent a time before digitalisation, with analog images that in their turn show a primitive fire made with old pyrotechnic techniques. The artist has edited these images as an atonal score, producing a rhythm of bonfires and fireworks that the zinc plates will reactivate.
Another start to this story is developed on the upper floor. By means of a coloured frieze painted in oils, the artist mimetically produces a frame-by-frame representation of a video circulating on the internet that documents a pyrotechnic exhibition she was fortunate enough to witness. The display revived old-fashioned types of firework, like the Castell de Pals and the Roman candle, in Valencia’s Plaza de la Virgen during the July Fair of 2017. The frieze also relates to theories of atonal music, applied in this case to the timbre of colour.

The title of the exhibition, Cardiograma, refers to the notion of diagnosing the state of the system as personified in the timeless sculpture of “democracy”, preserved by the guild of Falla artists alongside the ninots it has saved from destruction. At the same time, we can also understand the fiesta of the Fallas itself as an exercise in collective diagnosis, doubly held in suspense this year by the pandemic, that responds annually to the socio-political issues of the moment.

In this exhibition, Lola Lasurt continues her investigations “out of time”, a mode of deferred thought that dodges around historical doctrine and uses painting to reorganise other tales of our past where images, objects and (in this case) popular festivals speak to us of a complex passage. With the artist, we wonder which point of democracy we have reached. What were its initial objectives? What were its aspirations? The figure of “democracy”, surrounded by “shooting” fireworks, tells us of a world in retreat that is revived by the artist, its image bouncing back into our present day.

This project for IVAM by the artist Azucena Vieites (1967, Hernani) delves into the languages linked to a subcultural aesthetic and its forms of production, between low-fi (low-fidelity) artistic practice and the idea of editing. Vieites proposes a reflection on contemporary visual culture from resources such as multiplicity, fragment, appropriation or concealment and she questions the logic of classical narrative.

As its starting point, this project takes the realization of a workshop on feminist fanzine with students from the city of Valencia. Part of its development focuses on “remaking” a previous work by the artist called Break Out of Your Shell (2009).

The proposal will be installed in different transit spaces of the museum and will directly question the subjectivities that inhabit it.

Her work makes approaches to contemporary visual culture through graphic resources such as drawing or silkscreen printing. In 1994 she co-founded Erreakzioa-Reacción, an initiative to develop the project between art and feminism. Among her latest solo exhibitions are: Playing Across Papers, Sala Alcalá 31 (Madrid, 2020-2021); Hey Baby!, Box 27, Casal Solleric (Palma, 2018); Woollen Body, Carreras Múgica gallery (Bilbao, 2015); Tableau Vivant, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2013), or Fundido encadenado-Break You Nice, MUSAC (León, 2012). She has been part of the 11th edition of the Berlin Biennale 2020. Her work can be found in the collections of Museo Reina Sofía, CA2M, Artium, CGAC, Basque Government, MUSAC, Juntas Generales de Gipuzkoa and Fundación Botín.