Hybrid meeting place

Spain’s La Laboral is a room for art and cultural encounters in a former vocational school from the Franco era. Ana Luisa Valdés writes about an art hub with 12 500m² of exhibition space and a budget of 5 million €uros that is looking for its own form.

The province of Asturias stretches along the northern coast of Spain. During the middle ages Asturias was a principality. It was here that the Reconquista began when the Christian kings Pelayo, Ramiro and Alfonso started their struggle with the Arab invaders. Fish, shellfish, extensive forests, lofty mountains and coalmines have made Asturias a lively province. Gijón and Oviedo are elegant cities offering sophisticated urban life. But the mines are no longer worked and many of the old industries have now disappeared.

One of Europe’s most modern museums

Not far from Gijón, the Spanish government, the provincial authorities and the EU have invested large sums of money in order to transform a huge vocational school into one of Europe’s most modern museums and centres of education. La Laboral was built between 1948 and 1956 and was intended to be a self-sustaining city in which orphaned children of the mineworkers could be trained in various trades. This was a favourite Franco project, grandiose and wide-ranging. Nuns were responsible for feeding the pupils. They had their own convent close to the school.

A pocket of resistance

During the Spanish Civil War, Asturias was a pocket of resistance. The Spanish republic was defended there with the help of dynamite and guns. Numerous people were executed, while others fled into exile or hid in the mountains. Franco’s La Laboral was a sort of social utopia where youngsters would learn to live collectively and to pray.

Another mission

La Labora is now looking for another mission and, closest to hand, are culture and the experience sector. The first director of La Laboral, Rosina Gómez Baeza has a vision: La Laboral must attract a new public and must become a “hub” in which both international guests and the province’s own people can meet. Asturias is one of the provinces in Spain with a declining population. Young people leave the area because of a lack of jobs. This trend needs to be reversed. La Laboral is going to promote eco-tourism as well as design in interactive exhibitions.

Broad network

Rosina Gómez Baeza was previously in charge of Arco, the major art biennial in Madrid and she brings with her a broad network of international contacts. With 12 500m² of exhibition space and a budget of 5 million €uros La Laboral needs to find a suitable form for its activities. Large collections of art are not the answer here. There are already several museums in Gijón so La Laboral needs to create a concept of its own.

“Asturias is known for its industries. We used to ship coal and steel from here to the rest of the world. Now, with the help of the information society, we need to link art with industrial design and our own landscape; our water, our mountains and our valleys. We need to market the province, to promote eco-tourism and to provide experiences of art. We need help from IT to bring all this together”, Rosina Gómez Baeza maintains.

New artistic director

During the summer of 2009 a new artistic director for La Laboral has been appointed, a principal curator with roots in digital art: Benjamin Weil from the USA. He is to assist Rosina Gómez Baeza with his expertise in web-based art and digital networks. He has been head of Media Arts at SFMOMA, San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art, and he has a wide experience of net activism and interactivity.

Aiming to work internationally

The magnificent countryside of Asturias with kilometre-long beaches and tall mountains distinguish the province markedly from the tourist areas of Spain. La Laboral wants to work internationally and to join global actors to the local soil. There are German curators, French sommeliers and young Asturian artists. La Laboral wants to work with Asturias in mind and anthropologists and historians are visiting the villages up in the mountains to record the pre-war memories of elderly women, when they had to feed their families with almost no food available and when whatever there was to eat was shared out among all the families. There was poverty and anger but this laid the foundations for a strong sense of community.

Collecting memories

I meet Melania Fraga who is one of the young educators working with the pedagogical model that La Laboral intends to use. She travels to distant villages and collects people’s memories. It is principally the women who remember the war, the privations, famine and the hard grind in the mines.

“I want to introduce memory and narrative into our collections and our educational projects. My dream is that everyone should regard La Laboral like their own home, a place that one visits without dressing up and without any preconceived ideas. La Laboral has always been a centre of learning. Now it is time to create a hybrid of activists, people who are interest in art, teachers and neighbours. Older people and children will be able to meet each other here and learn from each other. Hybrid meeting places where trends and ideas are tested and where they generate new movements.

“Perhaps this is what is most revolutionary about our methodology. We don’t just sit in the museum waiting for people to come to us with proposals. We travel ourselves and seek out organizations and small societies that have an interesting idea that we can help them to realize. We have anthropologists, teachers and artists who are in favour of trying out new methodologies. We undertook a stimulating project called ‘Film & Kitchen’. We invited women to attend and we showed films of people eating or cooking food. We then had a discussion and after that we ate a dish or two that had been cooked in the film. This proved very popular. Women’s expertise was revalued and the men began to regard cooking with greater respect.”

Industrial design is important

Some of the museum’s first exhibitions were produced in collaboration with ZKM in Karlsruhe and Ars Electronica in Linz. La Laboral wants to be a place where new technologies and art create hybrid meeting places. ZKM’s artistic director Peter Weibel has travelled to Asturias to advise the new museum on several occasions. Industrial design is important in Asturias and the latest exhibition in the summer of 2009 presented automobile designs and developments, showing how the appearance and function of the motorcar have changed.

Scientists from all over Europe

Ecological consciousness is strong in the region and La Laboral has invited scientists from all over Europe to come to Asturias and discuss boundaries for maps with a new geography in which urban and rural aspects meet. The young architect Pablo de Soto is working on a project called Maipi which is mapping social movements and local players. At the end of July Maipi summoned a meeting at which similar initiatives were presented. Lebanese and Egyptian geographers showed their maps of Gaza and French hackers showed a GPS that can follow a farm animal from birth to slaughter.

“I was born in Asturias but trained as an architect both in Seville and Stockholm. At the moment I am working all over Europe and I think that Asturias can become an important centre for experimentation and for new ideas. We need to dig where we are for we have a rich history to investigate. During the Spanish Civil War Asturias was rebellious and innovative in the way it resisted. We can draw lessons from this and fight against the mainstream and commercialism that are threatening to transform the art world into a grand Biennial at which globe-trotting artists and curators meet each other”, Pablo de Soto explains.

A melting pot for meetings

La Laboral is a melting pot for exciting, intra-disciplinary meetings and unbounded creativity. One of the architects invited to attend is Eduardo Serrano who has chosen Malaga and southern Spain as his art project. He is a member of the Cartac collective that produces maps in collaboration with local inhabitants and societies. They run La Casa Invisibile, a building that was occupied by activists and that has now become a radical culture centre.

“Think how much room there is here for pursuing alternative projects. The place is too large to house collections. All the paintings and installations would be lost in these gigantic hangars. But the buildings are fantastic for festivals and concerts. And one can play modern music in the church and project light art onto the façade”, Eduardo Serrano explains.

Urban maps

Serrano is a theorist who likes to talk about urban mapping, about places where the city creates its own territory and where architecture and function are determined by the inhabitants themselves. He has been influenced by Hakim Bey, the pseudonym of author John Lambert Wilson. Hakim Bey is responsible for the notion of “TAZ” meaning Temporary Autonomous Zones. These are places where the centralized state has a weak presence and where people create self-sustaining pockets of resistance. Eduardo Serrano believes in networks and he sees in Asturias and in La Labora an important motor for a different way of relating to art, a more dynamic way. “Here one can show processes and not just finished products. So it is a good thing not to concentrate on collections but on living processes.”

Ana Luisa Valdés