Places categories: IVAM Centre Julio González

The specific project that Anna Malagrida (Barcelona, 1970) has developed for the IVAM, is the outcome of her interest in the festival of Fallas as a phenomenon of cultural identity, developed through observation of something that is on the fringe of the festival: its ashes.

The ashes of the Fallas monuments are a vestige of them, in the same way that a photograph preserves something that existed and is like a trace of it. Thus ashes function like a photograph, capable of activating the memory of those who knew what was photographed and establishing themselves as the last remains of a Falla.

Taking the idea of vestige and trace as its starting point, this project seeks to explore new forms that emerge from observation of the process of collecting the ashes of the Fallas monuments and observation of the actors involved. The involvement of those actors (street cleaners, lorry drivers, rubbish tip workers) in the project is an essential element that will nourish the works with their stories and their testimony, giving a new form to the experience of the festival.

This proposal poses the following questions: What is the common ground that corresponds to the personal memory shared during the festival? Is there is a form that can be associated with the collective memory, or is it an intimate personal memory situated in common ground?

Ángeles Marco (Valencia, 1947–2008) is one of the most important artists in the generation of artists that spearheaded the renovation of sculpture in Spain in the 1980s and 1990s. This artist – who was associated with the theoretical assumptions of international Conceptual Art and Post-Minimalism – and her legacy have not been sufficiently studied since her death a decade ago.

As part of its policy of giving visibility to female voices that have remained on the fringe of the official historiographic discourse, the IVAM is presenting a major selective exhibition devoted to this fundamental artist, twenty years after El taller de la memoria (The Workshop of Memory), the show that this institution devoted to her in the Centre del Carme, in which a group of six monumental installations was presented.

This new exhibition devoted to Ángeles Marco presents a carefully chosen selection of sculptures and drawings and a considerable amount of archive material representative of her entire career and not previously seen, concentrating on the series of works produced in her early years – Espacios ambiguos (Ambiguous Spaces), Entre lo real y lo ilusorio (Between the Real and the Illusory), El Tránsito (The Transition) and Salto al vacío (Leap into the Void), and on the works made from 2000 to the artist’s death.

Activity included in the program of the BMM2018, Biennial of Women in the Visual Arts -MAV-