- Madrid and Segovia: It will be displayed until September 29th in Madrid’s Campo del Moro and the Royal Collections Gallery’s Immersive Cube, and in La Granja from September
- ‘Fieldnotes’: The exhibit is part of a project in which top photographers will capture the Spanish Royal Sites’ natural heritage
Today was the launch of the Fieldnotes. Javier Vallhonrat exhibition, dedicated to the fountains of the Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, which commemorates the 300 years of its creation by Philip V.
This exhibition, which is part of the 2024 PHotoESPAÑA festival, can be visited free of charge at Madrid’s Campo del Moro until September 29th.
Vallhonrat has also produced an audiovisual piece titled Of streams, forests and torrents, which is on display from today at the Royal Collections Gallery.
From September, the exhibition will move to La Granja de San Ildefonso (Segovia), where the images can be seen in the context in which they were conceived.
The author, winner of Spain’s National Photography Award in 1995, shows the relationship between nature and the fountains’ 300-year-old hydraulic system in this photography series. “I worked while immersed in this natural nook, awed by the music of the waters that descend more than a thousand meters from the peaks of the Peñalara, Cerro Morete and El Nevero mountains, nourishing this ecosystem and powering the hydraulic system of the 300-year-old gardens of La Granja de San Ildefonso,” the artist explained during the inauguration.
The event was also attended by Ana de la Cueva, president of Spain’s National Heritage Agency; María Santoyo, director of PHotoESPAÑA; and Joaquín Mollinedo, ACCIONA’s chief officer of Institutional Relations, Communications and Branding, who all agreed on the importance of art, and specifically photography, as a tool to ensure the conservation of historical and natural heritage.
COLLABORATION
This exhibition is part of the three-year project titled Fieldnotes, in which ACCIONA, PHotoESPAÑA and Spain’s National Heritage Agency collaborate to encourage major national photographers to highlight the natural heritage of Spain’s Royal Sites.
PHotoESPAÑA, Spain’s National Heritage Agency and ACCIONA already collaborated in 2022, when they jointly promoted the exhibition titled Sebastião Salgado and the Royal Collections: encounters around landscape photography, displayed at Madrid’s Royal Palace.
ACCIONA and PHotoESPAÑA have been collaborating since 2017 to jointly give visibility to an artistic look at the human impact on nature and natural resources.
Last year, ACCIONA sponsored the exhibition titled Edward Burtynsky: African Studies. In previous editions, ACCIONA and PHotoESPAÑA have also worked together on some emblematic exhibitions such as Isabel Muñoz's We’re Water (Somos Agua), which was displayed at the Lázaro Galdiano Museum and became one of the most visited exhibitions of the 2021 edition, and the S.M.A.R.T photographic and audiovisual exhibition, which was one of the main activities of the 2019 edition.
The collaboration between both entities was not interrupted in 2020, when they teamed up to promote the #PHEdesdemibalcón contest in the 2020 virtual edition, which revealed the nature emerging in urban environments emptied by the COVID19 outbreak.
PHotoESPAÑA is a photography festival that has been held annually in Madrid since 1998 and has set an international benchmark in the visual arts, for the quality of artworks and artists in the official section, as well as for the cultural initiatives it promotes to disseminate the cultural and aesthetic value of photography in society.
Find out more about this initiative here.