Endesa's first thermal power plant becomes the headquarters of a project that gives new life to finished exhibitions

The América XXI

mural

was going to be destroyed, but at the last moment there was a change of plans: the work was saved and went on display in a cultural space in another city. Created by Baltazar Castellano and Olga Manzano in September 2021 to celebrate the 110 years of the Casa Amèrica Catalunya in Barcelona, ​​after being exhibited for more than two years in that space, it was going to be removed from the wall to make room for a new exhibition. And discarded, because its size of 24 meters wide had no place in the limited warehouse of the center. It was an ideal opportunity for the La Recicladora Cultural project to recover the piece for its headquarters and present its objective: to give new life to exhibitions that, otherwise, would not be seen again or would be destroyed once their life cycle had ended.

“The carbon footprint you leave in an exhibition ranges from the impressions you make to the transportation. Since this environmental investment is made, why not take advantage of it and maximize it by taking it to other places where they could not afford to have it?” explains Yasodhara López, general director of the City of Energy Foundation (Ciuden), a body attached to the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge and creator of the project. López presented the initiative last week to a group of people in charge of museums and cultural centers in the country at La Térmica Cultural, an artistic space located in Endesa's first thermal power plant in 1949, in Ponferrada. It is the headquarters of La Recicladora, the nerve center from where the traveling exhibitions will be distributed to other spaces and which will also serve as a temporary deposit of the works.

“Nothing happens if the exhibition owners do not want to rotate the pieces that have a lot of economic value or are especially sensitive to being transported, we adapt them to the demands of the centers,” López continues. He projects that over the course of a year the exhibitions will be created designed to be traveling through La Recicladora. The idea is not only to reuse the works, but also the production, presentation and signage materials of the exhibitions. For Marta Nin, director of Casa América Catalunya, where the most is spent when putting together an exhibition is on the framing of the works. The frames change according to the space of each room and are not saved: “You also have to think about the conceptual recycling that is done. You remove the vinyl and it is no longer useful for another exhibition, but the designer's work is.”

The independent curator and co-founder of the Contemporary Art Platform, Óscar García, illustrates how exhibition materials can be recycled with an anecdote. “When we were putting together an exhibition last year of Eusebio Sempere and Felipe Pantone at the Alicante Museum of Fine Arts, I found in the room two self-supporting walls from the previous exhibition that I did not need. Lacking space to store them, the museum destroyed them. If a next activity needs them again, they will have to be manufactured again.” Posters, display cases, urns, pedestals, translucent walls or signage are all reusable products when putting together an exhibition.

The type of exhibitions that best adapt to this idea of ​​circulation, according to García, are those of serial works, photography or graphic works. “As they are multiple edition pieces, their value is lower and they reduce expenses, mainly in insurance. It is the easiest way to test how it works and then enter into unique works such as painting, sculpture or installations.” Although the idea of ​​showing the same samples in different spaces is not new (the Community of Madrid has been developing the Itiner Network for decades to reach all the municipalities in the region), La Recicladora is the first to be presented to national level and with main emphasis on places in the country where there is no profuse cultural activity. Casa Amèrica de Catalunya, the Museum of Decorative Arts, the Niemeyer Center in Avilés, the Ethnographic Museum of Castilla y León and the production company Mil Ojos have already joined.

Another element with which it seeks to distinguish itself is to offer warehouses to protect the pieces, a constant problem for smaller cultural centers. “It involves a rental and transportation cost. All resources are usually focused on the production and generation of artistic resources,” says Nin. Therefore, La Recicladora has four warehouses in “good temperature and humidity conditions.” The warehouses are a small part of the enormous complex of more than 6,500 square meters that includes La Térmica Cultural, headquarters of La Recicladora and which has functioned as an activity center since March of last year.

In this large white mass, which was supplied with coal extracted from Bierzo and Laciana, the traces of the past and the present coexist. The gigantic concrete structures stand side by side with pristine white walls on which works of art are hung. In one of the rooms you can see how the old factory worked through virtual reality lenses, while in the space where the boilers were, a garden has been built with 400-year-old tree ferns, brought from New Zealand.

The Térmica Cultural currently houses the exhibitions of the naturalist photographer Luis Miguel Domínguez, a retrospective of the pop artist Eduardo Arroyo and another of the history of thermal and mining power plants in Spain. The latter, titled

Just Transition: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

, comes from As Pontes and inaugurates the traveling exhibitions of La Recicladora. Through several photographs by Eduardo Urdangaray, creator of the Mining Historical Archive, the communities that were created around energy production, the closure of the plants in the ecological transition and the new alternatives that the mines have become are shown. thermal plants without losing their mining identity, building bridges to the future on the basis of memory.

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