Juan Gopar, Lara Almarcegui: Workshop-Exhibition

  • Curator: Alicia Chillida
  • Coordination: Elvira Dyangani Ose
  • Place: CAAM, Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 2005-2006
  • Lectures: Francesco Careri, José Luis Guerín, Juan Antonio González, Santiago B. Olmo, Juan Palop
  • Photography: Nacho González, courtesy of CAAM
  • See publication

Introduction. Alicia Chillida

This new workshop-exhibition-intervention typology begins with a first meeting between artists Juan Gopar (Lanzarote, 1958) and Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972). Each of them leads a research workshop aimed at the participation of a small group of participants in which they offer strategies to reinterpret the everyday environment. The workshop includes a series of lectures open to the public, given by Francesco Careri, architect and founding member of the Stalker collective; José Luis Guerín, filmmaker and author of 'En construcción'; Juan Antonio González, architect; Santiago B. Olmo, art critic, and Juan Palop, architect and urban planner, co-director of the Cities Forum.

Juan Gopar and Lara Almarcegui exhibit their work in parallel to incorporate in a second phase the proposals made by the workshop participants. San Antonio Abad becomes a space-laboratory that in its vocation to project emerging Canarian art, incorporates a reflection of greater scope: the dialogue of local art with national and international creation, and its openness to the interpellation with the Canarian society and its daily life.

Between memory and prophecy.
The artist on his island. Juan Gopar

The workshop proposes a walkabout, a walk around, a story that comes and goes incessantly, an interval that places us in no man's land, isolates us. Agustín Espinosa said when he wrote Lancelot, 28º-7º: "My attempt is to create a new Lanzarote, a Lanzarote invented by me" and he quotes Paul Dermée: "to create a work that lives outside itself, outside its own life, and that is located in a special sky like an island on the horizon".

A scratch of light (1991-2004). Juan Gopar. A project for CAAM.

The idea is to offer the possibility of building your own island, to build your own space, an invisible architecture that situates us, that welcomes us, that precedes us, that feeds on the story of our life and takes shape in an instant, in a flash, in a scratch of light: when the light of meaning leaves, it does so with a flash that has revealed the invisible world, as Shakespeare would write. A flash that does not clarify, that does not reveal. Only perhaps a few, the most intimate, will be able to know the secret. And it is with these that you will always walk. (...)

Prospecting a site.
Guided Tour. Lara Almarcegui

The phase prior to the realization of a specific project is the investigation of the site, this investigation provokes more questions than results. These questions can generate both a critical attitude and a project. The workshop will provoke some questions that have to do with the layout of the city and how this layout affects citizens: What possibilities do citizens have to escape a certain urban organization? What initiatives are there to resist or alter this given space? What abandoned places are available? Is there any possibility to have an attitude of living use of space? In this case, the workshop proposes an investigation of areas in transformation in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.

The places that interest me and that I propose as a starting point are: industrial land in the port area, vacant lots, unoccupied houses, buildings that are being demolished or are planned to be demolished, ruins. Spaces that do not respond to a design, self-buildings and vegetable gardens in the periphery of the city or any spontaneous and temporary use given to the space. My selection of these places as work material defines my positioning with respect to the city.

The workshop participants will select a place that interests them, they will visit it, investigate it in depth and make a project consisting of showing that place explaining what is there and what happens there. I invite the participants to propose a guided tour, to formalize it and give it content. (...)

 

A cabin in the confital.
Lara Almarcegui. Specific project for CAAM.

"They told me that the hut had been a bar, with a rope they used to lower beer to the fishermen who settled down on the rocks.

Once you have spent a few hours in the Confital, it is very difficult to return to the city, to get dressed, to work, the city imposes rules that do not exist in the Confital.

While I was working, an excavator razed the other remaining hut, it was the minimum to close a space: a wall inside a cave. Only the cabin I'm restoring is left. It's hard to work here, it's hot and dusty. I clean. I move and remove stones from the hut, garbage: I paint the bench and the wall in the same color as the original".

(Excerpts from the catalog, ed. CAAM, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2006).