MEMORIES OF THE SOIL

Description

MEMORIES OF THE SOIL

Dates: July 10 to October 4, 2026

Artist: Juana Francés, Esther Gatón, Elena Lavellés, Menhir, Daniel Ortega, Miguel Sbastida, Julia Varela and Laia Ventayol

Location: Center del Carme. Room 2

Organized by: Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community

Produced by: Consortium of Museums of the Valencian Community

Curator: Núria Montclús

The awareness of our impact on the Earth and its geological temporality, largely stemming from the expansion and consolidation of the sometimes debated notion of the “Anthropocene,” not only leads us to rethink our ways of living, but also prompts us to reconsider the role of the soil as a constantly changing, living space, a container of future memories of the present.

Given this realization, Memories of the Soil investigates how, in contemporary artistic practices, the Earth's surface is taken as a creative source from which new realities, new critical forms, and new possible imaginaries linked to our existence emerge.

The works gathered in the project take as their starting point the morphologies of the soil, its problems, and the possibilities offered by its constituent components—minerals, fossils, waste, and plastic composites—to construct and deconstruct identities and narratives of the present, the future, and the past.

We are witnessing a new resurgence of matter, which we could compare to a revisited, expanded Informalism. But unlike Manolo Millares, Antonio Saura, Antoni Tàpies, and other great Informal artists, in current practices its creative centrality no longer lies in the expression of an existential self, but rather in its role as an ecological, geological, and political agent. In this sense, these new materialities resonate especially with the only female member of the El Paso group and, perhaps, one of the most forgotten: Juana Francés.

It was she who knew how to recognize and reposition matter within its context, endowing it with its full potential.

The exhibition proposes a dialogue between the evolution of this 20th-century Alicante artist's practice and the creations of various contemporary artists (Esther Gatón, Elena Lavelllés, Menhir, Daniel Ortega, Miguel Sbastida, Julia Varela, Laia Ventayol), in order to present a comparative analysis of the aesthetics and narratives that emanate from contemporary art.

The result presents the paradoxical, fascinating, and somewhat terrifying fact of the emergence of a creative fertility born from a soil in the process of destruction, while also raising the question of whether it is not through these new narratives and imaginaries, poetic and ecocritical, that it may be possible to conceive ways of repairing its own wounds.