Castillete. Retablo Minero

Castillete. Mining Tableau (Landscape in Motion I) is an investigation and specific production devoted to reflecting on the different layers of meaning that compete and negotiate with one another when shaping the idea of landscape. By selecting a specific location, the artist directs her attention at the sedimentation processes that took place in that location with the intention of accessing the accumulation, rectification and deposit of diverse materials, experiences and stories that are hidden under the surface and that demonstrate the impossibility of subjecting the representation of landscape to a unitary cartography. This initiative lies within the framework of a series of recent works including Bewegliches Zentrum. The Centre in Motion I produced in Berlin during the summer of 2010 and La citoyennetè. The Centre in Motion II created for the city of Paris (in collaboration with Manuel Segade). Castillete. Mining Tableau is based on a set of approaches to the valley and the people of Sabero (Leon), site of the country’s first 19th-century iron and steel mining industry, which failed a number of years later, thereafter subsisting exclusively as a mining operation. Despite the industrial boom and the fact that Sabero was home to different immigrant colonies and communities until the mine’s definitive closure in the 1990s, its landscape hardly reveals the impact of these settlements beyond the ghostly nature of the numerous facilities now in disuse and the housing units built to accommodate the increasing population during the early 20th century. The exhibition, conceived as a vehicle for relating the materials, stories, records and vestiges that make up the different sedimentary layers of this landscape, is intended to stimulate the study of these components as a process of self-reflectiveness that may lead to deeper knowledge of the aesthetic and epistemological implications that are implicit in the artist’s own desire to get to know the place.

(curatorial text excerpt, Leire Vergara)

 

The Form and Meaning exhibition series, curated by Leire Vergara, is structured around three monographic exhibitions by the artists Hiwa K, Carme Nogueira Alejandra Riera and a group project by the Leon-based artists Nilo Gallego, Silvia Zayas and Chus Domínguez.

 

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