Remembering the future

Elena Lavellés

19.02.2022 – 30.04.2022

Lucía Mendoza gallery presents Remembering the Future, the first solo exhibition by Elena Lavellés at our space. Curated by Diana Padrón, the exhibition offers a journey through the trajectory of the artist, focused on the study of the evolution of capitalism, the impact of the exploitation of natural and human resources in the context of environmental racism, as well as the possibility of conceiving new action protocols where the planet, life and social justice are central in the current moment of climate crisis.

The exhibition, which can be visited until April 30th, collects from cartographies and images corresponding to areas of natural resource extraction or destruction by the mining industry in the United States, the Gulf of Mexico, Brazil or Serbia, to a series of sculptures composed of waste from the burning of coal in power plants and made in collaboration with the Institute of Construction Sciences of the CSIC.

Elena Lavellés (Madrid, 1981) proposes an alternative reading to the dystopian futures so present in our contemporaneity and does so through the information provided by the past, the terrestrial sediments and the use made of them to understand the world in what we live and how to preserve it.

The artist articulates all this nucleus of speculations in Remembering the future, uniting science, experimentation and art, and revealing the interactions between corporate power relations, extractivism or the processes of transformation of the Earth. She does so through various media –photography, drawing, painting, sculpture or video– and uses research as a method with procedures typical of Geology that acquire their full potential here: the ability to distort our exhausted present by allowing us to read the future in the past.

This exhibition awarded by Ayuda de Promoción del Arte Contemporáneo del Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte.