Valencia art

Dodgy by design
Tourists are usually right to avoid rundown areas of cities - but not in Valencia during its arts festival, says Annie Bennett
(Filed: 12/07/2003)
 

Walking around derelict city sites is a strange way to spend a Saturday morning on a weekend break, but this summer in Valencia there is good reason to stray away from the more conventional sights. The Bienal festival is under way, entitled "The Ideal City", with a range of events including exhibitions by the photographer Sebastião Salgado, the film-maker Mike Figgis, the architect Will Alsop and the artists Bruce McLean and Gilbert & George.

Unlike many arts festivals, the Bienal is aimed at everyone living in or visiting the city, and events are free or reasonably priced. A lot of Spanish cities are pretty quiet in July and August as the locals decamp to the coast to escape the heat. But as Valencia is right on the Mediterranean, with its own beach and plenty more to choose from up and down the coast, you can easily combine culture with sunbathing - and the city has one of the liveliest nightlife scenes in Spain.

Although Valencia has been dramatically revamped in the past few years, parts of the old town are incredibly shabby and neglected. In the Carme neighbourhood near the cathedral many grand mansions dating from the 16th and 17th centuries have been restored, but you have only to turn a corner to find yourself in a scene reminiscent of a war zone, with dilapidated, half-demolished buildings flanking overgrown disused plots.

This situation began during the Civil War (1936-39), when Valencia suffered heavy bombing. Twenty years later, in 1957, the Turia river, which used to curve around the old town, broke its banks and flooded the city. Many buildings collapsed or subsided, never to be rebuilt.

It is unusual to see so much degradation in the heart of a European city, especially one that has invested massively in urban regeneration. These plots are abandoned because there are Roman remains throughout the old town, and anyone wishing to develop land has to fund excavation work before any building work can begin. This would be so expensive and time-consuming that developers just look elsewhere.

Yet Valencia is in fact one of the most atmospheric and dynamic cities in Spain. It is worth visiting just to see the fabulous City of Arts and Sciences, designed by Santiago Calatrava, and the recently opened Oceanográfic marine park, which is the biggest in Europe.

Strolling about the old town is an uplifting rather than a depressing experience, particularly during the Bienal. One of the main features of the festival is called Solares, which is the Spanish name for the derelict plots and means a place filled with sunlight. Curated by Lorand Hegyi, a Hungarian philosopher and art historian, the project has transformed 30 of these sites by installing a range of artworks created especially for the Bienal by artists from all over the world.

These spaces are formed by walls where vestiges of former rooms are clearly discernible. Peeling paint and wallpaper, bathroom and kitchen tiles and odd fragments of stairs, windows and doors give an intimate insight into former lives.

The surviving buildings are like artworks in themselves, with faded ochre, pink, blue and grey façades decorated with dainty wrought-iron balconies and dusty plants. People still live in these apartments, which are becoming increasingly coveted, and many have been restored to their former splendour. Looking up, you see secret roof terraces with plants and flowers spilling tantalisingly over the top.

As I wandered around, I came across a side wall decorated with shards of shattered mirrors, which reflected the sky and the apricot-and-blue façade and tiled balconies of the building opposite. This simple yet highly effective piece was by the renowned Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto.

In the Placa Tabernes de Valldigna, a wall had been painted pink and decorated with red plastic buckets filled with brightly coloured artificial roses, with photos of famous people stuck on the front. I think this work, La Vie en Rose, by a German artist, Gloria Friedmann, was supposed to be a comment on our obsession with celebrities, but it was a fun thing to look at whatever it was supposed to mean.

After an hour or so of my tour, I was wondering if every pile of old wood or plastic bottles dumped in the sites was meant to be an artwork. Usually I would be marching briskly through these slightly dodgy streets, on my way to the latest designer restaurant or bar, but the Solares were making me linger at the most unlikely spots. As well as seeing the artworks, I spotted beautiful houses and intriguing old shops and workshops that I had never noticed before.

Some of the craftspeople who live and work in the Carme quarter feature in Sebastião Salgado's exhibition The Face, Mirror of Society at the MUVIM, one of Valencia's swanky new exhibition spaces. Known for his work documenting the exploitation of workers around the world, and people fleeing wars and political oppression, Salgado spent six weeks in the city photographing all sorts of people at temporary studios set up in different parts of town.

The portraits illustrate the diversity of Valencia's inhabitants, and feature bullfighters, drag artists, schoolchildren, football supporters, immigrants from Senegal and Nigeria, gipsies, Muslims, graffiti artists, flowersellers and fisherwomen from El Palmar, a village bordering the Albufera freshwater lake south of the city.

Mike Figgis, director of the film Leaving Las Vegas, has taken over Los Palacios, a row of 18th-century mansions, to create the Museum of the Imperfect Past. Although the houses had been abandoned for about 30 years, the rooms still have the original tiled floors and patterned walls, and there is a kitchen with ornate ceramic decoration, featuring cooks, maids and butlers in the middle of their daily tasks, with dogs and cats filching sausages and sardines off passing trays.

Figgis has created a series of eerie film installations in the mansions. Walking through the series of dark rooms is a weird, unsettling experience. Confronted with a series of disturbing images and sounds, I felt I was having a very strange dream. In one room, a film projected on to a window frame features a woman singing a plangent, otherworldly song. In another, a series of screens shows women driving alone in Los Angeles, talking about their lives and things that have affected them. One section is devoted to war, with models of planes and crushed cans on the floor, looking like the debris of aircraft.

This may sound heavy, but you soon emerge into a delightful courtyard, where a bar has been installed. Sitting under the palm and lemon trees with a cold beer is the ideal way to reflect on what you have seen.

There is more light relief at A&M: The Department Store of Proper Behaviour, created by Will Alsop and Bruce McLean in the cloisters of the beautiful Convento del Carmen. As we devote so much time and energy to shopping these days, they decided to explore ways to make the experience more fun, intelligent and stimulating.

They came up with a dance department, where you run along a spongy tiled floor that moves and bounces as you go, flanked by bright pink and orange walls. There is a smoking department in a darkened room where you lie back on shocking-pink loungers, ashtray handily placed at your side, watching a film and drinking whisky at the same time.

Another corridor is covered with words. This is the reading department, with four stories by four writers inscribed on four tables. At the bar you can sit on a metal structure painted in primary colours, like a playground climbing frame.

By this stage, however, my favourite part was collapsing on a purple inflatable bed - in a huge tent. Now that is something every department store should have.

Valencia basics

The Bienal de Valencia runs until the end of September. Further information: 0034 96 392 4850, www.masdearte.com/bienaldevalencia. Valencia tourist information: 0034 96 398 6422, www.landofvalencia.com.

Annie Bennett travelled with Thomson Cities and Short Breaks (0870 606 1476, www.thomsoncities.co.uk). Between July 17 and August 25, two nights' b & b at the four-star Vincci Lys hotel costs from £384 per person based on two sharing, including British Airways flights from Gatwick, taxes, and a guidebook. Between August 26 and September 15, the price is £321.

The original article is at:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2003/07/12/etvalenx.xml

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