Acto I: La Eterna Adolescencia
Curated by Gilberto González
TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Santa Cruz de Tenerife
30 September 2023 – 21 April 2024

Acto I: La Eterna Adolescencia, by Álvaro Urbano, introduces the visitor to a timeless dream with the recreation of the Gazmira, a hotel that began to be built at the end of the 50s on the mountain of Tenisca (La Palma). 

In Acto I: La Eterna Adolescencia, Álvaro Urbano introduces the viewer to a timeless dream with the recreation of the Gazmira, a hotel that began to be built in the late 1950s on the mountain of Tenisca (La Palma) that was never finished. As an unfinished project by the palm architect Rubens Henríquez, the Gazmira left the radiant promise of tourism on the Island frozen. After a decade of enormous economic benefits, from emigration and agriculture, it seemed logical to reinvest them in a new project capable of extracting even greater yield from the land. A combination of quality water for irrigation, in private hands since the conquest, along with long hours of sunshine, seemed to be a combination as conducive to tourism as it was for the banana. This happened on an island where geology and with it the human, even today, seem to participate in an endless cycle of destruction and constant rebirth.

Álvaro Urbano has created an installation that is part of his work belonging to the TEA Collection, Hotel Gazmira (2021). On this occasion, the project reaches the dimension of an installation that contains sculptural works produced for the exhibition such as Papaver Somniferum 1, 2 and 3 (2023), Devil’s Tree (2023) or Honeycombs (2023). Of enormous complexity Urbano generates a space that confronts the viewer with different possible presents in which ruin is in turn a proposal of continuity.

Translated from the curatorial text.

Photos by M. Laura Benavente Sovieri