The Albufera

This exhibition offers a close look at the Albufera of Valencia, a coastal lagoon and one of the most significant wetlands in the western Mediterranean, understood not only as a physical or geographic site but as the result of overlapping historical, economic, and environmental layers that have shaped it over time. Here, the Albufera is approached through its postnatural condition, where culture and nature form a system of relations and tensions between the human and the non-human. The exhibition unfolds as a journey through representations of the Albufera from the mid-19th century to the present, drawing on works and documentation from different periods. It includes the photographic project "L’Albufera. Tangential Vision" (1985), a pioneering initiative promoted by IVAM in the years before the museum opened. In this context, IVAM enters into dialogue with its own history and takes an active role in supporting artistic research beyond curatorship, backing six works created specifically for this exhibition by Bleda i Rosa, Paula García-Masedo, Lucía Loren, Teresa Marín García, Jorge Ribalta, and Jorge Yeregui. The four decades separating the two projects make it possible to trace both changes in the landscape and shifts in the ways artists investigate and represent a place. Alongside these new commissions, the exhibition brings together photographs, documents, and artworks that explore the different ways this singular ecosystem has been inhabited, imagined, studied, and protected. From 19th-century romantic imagery and traditional agricultural uses to tourism, industrialization, environmental activism, and the contemporary challenges of the ecosocial crisis, the exhibition assembles traces, accounts, and remains that reveal the many layers of the Albufera and invite reflection on possible futures for this shared territory.