Lara Almarcegui. Projects 1995-2010
The publication Lara Almarcegui. Projects 1995–2010 will be the first monograph to date of Lara Almarcegui’s work. Although Almarcegui has made many small format guidebooks as integral parts of her projects, this will be the first publication presenting an overview of the last fifteen years of artistic practice.
The main part of the publication is formed by detailed documentation of the artist’s works and publications companioned by new descriptive texts written by the editors. These are presented in the following sections: 'Demolition', ‘Excavation’, ‘Construction materials’, ‘Ruins’, ‘Wastelands’ (survey, access, and preservation).
Alongside an introductory essay by the editors, art critic, curator and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina and the theorist and curator Lars Bang Larsen contribute texts. Medina presents a revised and updated version of a previously unpublished essay entitled ‘The beauty of open space: Lara Almarcegui and the freedom of the unplanned’. The essay involves an analysis of the ‘aesthetic tautology’ of the 17th-century English garden – ‘a field turned into a garden which is made to seem like a field’ – and develops a context for Almarcegui’s work through a partial history of man’s ‘perfection’ of nature, and more especially the concept of nature as coincidental with the origin of industrial modernity. Lars Bang Larsen offers an interpretation of a single work from the artist’s Construction materials series: Construction materials, City of São Paulo (2006). Based on a talk given by the author at the Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Space, New York, October 2009, Bang Larsen argues that “Almarcegui’s work equips us with the hubris to reconceive of the city and evaluate and re-organise it as a social space”. More information
Lara Almarcegui. Projects 1995–2010
Edited by: Latitudes
Published by: Archive Books
Texts by: Cuauhtémoc Medina, Lars Bang Larsen and Latitudes
Graphic Design: Archive Appendix
Format: 224 pages, colour, 21 x 27.5 cm. Black-and-white and colour illustrations. Flexicover, English.
Language: English
Print-run: 1,500
Printer: Medialis, Berlin
Date of Publication: December 2011
ISBN: 978-88-95702-05-6
€ 35