Lara Almarcegui. Projects 1995–2010

‘Lara Almarcegui. Projects 1995–2010’ served as the first comprehensive monograph on Lara Almarcegui's work to date. While Almarcegui had created several small-format guidebooks as integral parts of her projects, this publication marked the first time an overview of her artistic practice from the preceding fifteen years was presented.

The core of the publication consisted of detailed documentation of the artist’s works and publications, accompanied by newly written descriptive texts written from the editors. These texts were structured under the sections ‘Demolition’, ‘Excavation’, ‘Construction materials’, ‘Ruins’, ‘Wastelands’ (survey, access, and preservation). Alongside an introductory essay by the editors, contributions were included from art critic, curator, and art historian Cuauhtémoc Medina and theorist and curator Lars Bang Larsen.

Medina offered a revised and updated version of a previously unpublished essay titled ‘The beauty of open space: Lara Almarcegui and the freedom of the unplanned’. The essay analysed the ‘aesthetic tautology’ of the 17th-century English garden – ‘a field turned into a garden which is made to seem like a field’ – and established a context for Almarcegui’s work through a partial history of humanity's attempts to ‘perfect’ nature, with a particular focus on the concept of nature coinciding with the rise of industrial modernity.

Lars Bang Larsen provided 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 argued that “Almarcegui’s work equips us with the hubris to reconceive of the city and evaluate and re-organise it as a social space”.

To coincide with Almarcegui's solo show at TENT, Rotterdam (6 May–26 June 2011), Latitudes' convened a conversation with the artist to discuss their long-term collaboration and, in particular, the editorial process of the monograph. Cuauhtémoc Medina, art historian and essayist for the catalogue, joined the discussion, reading excerpts from his essay ‘Lara Almarcegui and the freedom of the unplanned’, included in the publication.