A hybrid between travel chronicle and studio process notebook, this artist book tracks the construction of a failed modernist fantasy in the island of La Palma and the hallucinogenic properties of wild plants that grow across the Canary Islands.
The publication enacts the physical experience of the multimedia installation anchored in TEA, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, often dizzying and entangled, the different texts ramble across the banana plantations, now transformed into touristic hotspots among the fertile volcanic backdrop. Just as the botanic sculptures crafted by Urbano, the book is an exercise in appearance and apparition, using the Canary archipelago as a platform to reflect on the value of ruins as material memory.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, in 2023-2024.
Born 1983 in Madrid, Álvaro Urbano lives and works in berlin. His polymorphous work (photo, installation, sculpture) draws on the concept of heterotopia defined by Michel Foucault. He is interested in the notion of space as well as its possible temporal, physical, or visual definitions. Since 2014, he has frequently collaborated with the artist Petrit Halilaj.
