Lara Almarcegui’s Rubble Construction At Secession, Vienna

Spanish-born artist Lara Almarcegui is renowned for creating site-specific studies of urban transformation. Her work arises with a focus on the less-considered existence of wastelands, construction materials and invisible elements.

The ‘Construction Rubble’ installation in the historic exhibition hall of Vienna’s Secession presents heaps of construction materials. Almarcegui has measured and piled the quantities of the materials required to build the exhibition space, forming an “Wastelands are the only places in the city that remain without definition.”
interior landscape with mountains of chalk, concrete, wood, brick, terrazzo, steel, polystyrene and glass. The artist marks an unidentifiable point in urban transformation–‘Construction Rubble’ could equally signify the destruction or preparation of a building site. As she visually preserves this transitional moment, Almarcegui comments on recycling processes and the continuous evolution of the urban environment: by deconstructing existing urban structures, the artist provides the raw material for new ones. Interested in the ambiguity of this transition, Almarcegui explains, “Wastelands are important because they are the only places in the city that remain without definition. Untouched by design, everything that takes place in them happens by chance and not according to a plan.”