Colonization Towns. Views of an Invented Landscape. Ana Amado and Andrés Patiño

Activity

The architecture table 11

Library

General public, Professionals

5 June 2025

The National Colonization Institute (INC) program stimulated Spain's devastated post-war economy through the creation of new irrigation systems. Dams and canals were built that would bring water to three hundred new towns inhabited by settlers, migrants in their own land.

Ana Amado and Andrés Patiño revisit, more than five decades after its completion, an undertaking that transformed the Spanish landscape and the lives of its forgotten protagonists in an integral and planned manner.

Coordinated by: Santiago Varela

In collaboration with: College of Architects of Alicante

Information

Opening hours: 7:00 PM
Duration: 90 minutes
Type of activity: Design and Architecture
Modality: At the museum

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The MACA presents the largest Kara Walker exhibition held to date in Spain. The exhibition, which can be visited until September 7, is curated by Rosa Castells, and offers a journey through her trajectory over the last four decades. Kara Walker is one of the most prominent artists of her generation and one of the most interesting figures in the international art scene, with a complex body of work that analyzes, in sometimes chaotic scenes, issues of race, identity, power and desire used always as systems of oppression and subjugation, across centuries and continents.The exhibition brings together the numerous works by Kara Walker present in the Michael Jenkins and Javier Romero collection at the MACA. It consists of 44 pieces that cover part of her trajectory and constitute one of the most complete sets of the artist's work existing in European institutions. Here are displayed drawings, prints, sculptures, artist books and one of her most recent videos, a total of 31 works donated in ownership to the MACA in 2021 and 13 pieces deposited in 2024 for this exhibition that have traveled from New York. Her work addresses themes of violence, identity, race and sexuality in the context of the still-present psychological wound caused by the tragic legacy of slavery, presenting a critical vision of the historical past and examining racial and gender stereotypes in our current society.Known for her work of paper-cut silhouettes, inspired by the historical tradition of Victorian shadow portraits, shadow theater or magic lanterns, Walker uses, in works of great formal beauty, the language of satire and archetypes to reveal the contradictions of the concept a nation has of itself, while casting a very lucid subversive gaze on the historical-artistic allusions that influence her works.Through drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video and installation, the artist explores the representation of the notion of race in modern and contemporary art, as well as the need to establish new narratives that challenge the way we look at and understand history. The images in Walker's work, drawn from both historical realism and the fantastical space of the imagined, seduce through their emotional rawness, the intellectual force they contain and their extraordinary visual beauty.

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Related activities

Program to which it belongs

The architecture table

General public ... , 29.01.2015 - 17.12.2026

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Alicante whose collections are formed by works created fundamentally in the twentieth century. They range from the so-called avant-gardes to all the approaches and artistic manifestations that took place in the decades of the second half of the past century. They are expressed on different supports and materials, with diverse dimensions and techniques. In turn, the temporary exhibitions are related to these collections and allow for expanding or deepening some aspects of contemporary chronology. However, contemporary architecture is absent from both the permanent collections and those temporary manifestations.The architecture of the MACA itself, a project created and directed by the Sancho Madridejos Studio, is a beautiful building of great functional efficiency. The syncopated projection of horizontal and vertical spaces establishes a formal order based on the geometry and texture of the materials used in construction, while revealing a kind of tension resolved by the overhead passage of light, a kind of "felt" spirituality more emotional than real.The MACA proposes in a conversational format, meetings around art and architecture around the architect's table. In the MACA Library, the last Thursdays of each month, from January to May 2015.This first cycle will consist of different manifestations. The first and fundamental one will show works by an architect related through his vital and professional activity to the province of Alicante. The selection criterion will be conditioned by the modernity of the proposals, understanding that modernity, first of all, in a chronological sense, attending to those architectures and architects who were protagonists and participants in the advent of contemporaneity. The exhibition of some models will allow for offering three-dimensional models, reclaiming the model as such, as the authors of the Renaissance defended. And to illustrate the complete work process, sketches and preliminary drawings will be shown alongside the project plans and notes developed during the construction process. All of this with the ultimate aim of understanding and grasping in some way the constructed space.The architect's table, a table from 1912, real and present (deposited in the MACA by its owner Alfonso Navarro Guzmán), serves as an ideological foundation to link the exhibitions and will serve as the material support for the models so that we can traverse, while dreaming, the imagined space.

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