LARA ALMARCEGUI (ES)
Residency period: May – July 2022
Lara Almarcegui lives and works in Rotterdam. She often explores neglected sites, carefully cataloguing and highlighting each location’s tendency towards entropy. As Spain’s representative to the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, she filled the pavilion with massive piles of building rubble similar to that used for its construction. Working at a time of widespread urban renewal in Europe, she has remained a champion of forgotten sites – creating guides for the cities’ wastelands and even instigating their legal protection. Recently, the artist has been working towards the acquisition of mineral rights on iron ore deposits in order to prevent extraction in key natural sites.
Almarcegui’s work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at La Panera Art Center in Lerida (2021), the Graphische Samlung at ETH Zurich (2020), IVAM in Valencia (2019), the Kunstverein Springhornhof (2017), Casino Luxembourg (2016), Kunsthaus Baselland (2015), and CREDAC in Ivry-sur-Seine and at MUSAC in León (2013). She was also featured in group shows such as 5 Site Encounters (M+ Hongkong), the 2019 Rabat Biennale, the 2017 Lyon Biennale, Wohnungsanfrage (HKW Berlin), Manifesta IX in Genk, Radical Nature (Barbican, London), the 2008 Gwangju Biennale and the 2007 Sharjah Biennial.
With her project Mineral Rights: What Lies Beneath and Who Owns It, Lara Almarcegui expresses her deep engagement with the most direct concerns of the earth. Who owns the subsurface of the globe? What lies there, and how is it divided and distributed? As part of her inquiry on the use of natural resources, Almarcegui started an ongoing project consisting of acquiring the rights on ore deposits underground. Without actually extracting the mineral, the project is a study on extraction that brings to light questions of ownership of land and resources. During her residency at La Becque, Lara Almarcegui first rethought the formalization of her project and secondly devised ways to make notions of future resource management understandable, investigating new policies on mineral rights policies and the speculative possibilities these policies open up.
Lara Almarcegui, Art Basel 2018, Creative Time, Basilea