Lanzarote, first venue to the exhibition ‘100 years: Lanzarote and César’ that will tour the Canary Islands
The activities of the centenary of the birth of César Manrique begin their exhibition program with the inauguration of two exhibitions this Friday, March 29, at 20.30, at the CIC El Almacén. To the already announced, ‘Warehouse 1974’, organized by the Culture Area of the Cabildo of Lanzarote and curated by Pepe Betancort, is added the exhibition ‘100 years: Lanzarote and César’, promoted by the Cabildo de Lanzarote and the Government of the Canary Islands and curated by Alejandro Krawietz and Juan Gopar.
This exhibition is a multidisciplinary project with which Alejandro Krawietz and Juan Gopar aspire to tell the last 100 years of the life of Lanzarote from the perspective of different perspectives. Through a series of thematic axes that operate as windows, a broad and pertinent vision of the story of this century is provided, from 1919, when César Manrique was born, until today, inviting us to investigate the transformation of the Island from then until the I presented.
The exhibition, which opens this Friday, March 29, at 8:30 p.m., is scheduled to tour the entire archipelago, thanks to the agreement of the FECAI whereby the seven councils have committed to bear the costs involved in the assembly on each island of the project.
100 years: Lanzarote and César
In 1923 Domingo Doreste “Fray Lesco” opens the diary of a trip to Lanzarote with the phrase “Except in case of necessity or convenience, I believe that few people go to Lanzarote if there is no opportunity”. Almost a hundred years later, the success of the Island’s tourist and cultural project, as well as the three million tourists who visit it each year, invite us to investigate the transformations, reinventions and findings of a territory that no one doubts in pointing out as Insular progress model. In 1919, César Manrique was born, a catalyst for many of these changes and the main protagonist of the renewal of Lanzarote. The exhibition 100 years: Lanzarote and César tries to contribute, through a series of thematic axes that operate as windows, a broad and relevant vision of the story of these hundred years: on the path that goes from the wooden windmill to the park wind, from the salt mines to the tourist, from the camel to the electric bicycle, from the inshore fisherman to the surfer.
The aridity of Lanzarote, the apparent hardness of its landscape and its climate, has not prevented the island from taking part in some of the most important intellectual and aesthetic adventures of the 20th century in the Canary Islands: not only César Manrique, but also Manolo Millares, Agustín Espinosa , Manuel Padorno or Rafael Arozarena built a complete image of the Islands around the metaphysics of Lanzarote. Science, technology, social processes, tourism, research, alternative energies or sustainable development are among the axes of the project’s analysis. Because Lanzarote is an island capable of magnetizing many looks towards itself. This is what Fray Lesco recognizes in his narration of the trip, a few pages later, when he seems to discover one of the keys to the enormous beauty of the Island: “In Lanzarote” he writes, “the mountains seem satisfied with their height”.
