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The first thing we had to do was to clean out our own feelings. We
decided to use the palace to tell the story of the city’s history. This
decision did not involve too many complications because the objects
would be in a known eco-system; it is an “eco-logic” location. The
more ancient remains of that construction dated to an era when the
first inhabitants came to Elche, back in the eleventh or twelfth century
of our era. Moreover, the access to the parking lot was through
one of the oldest fortress gates, leading to the oldest ruins of the entire
construction. This is an ideal space to talk about the founding and
development of the city. From this area, there is an access to the castle
patio, and from there, to the new construction. The two floors of
this area would be used to tell the history as of the thirteenth century
(the Reconquest) until today. It was as if the space were asking for
it; it was a new construction connected to the walls of a palace built
between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. Obviously, those
two huge Iberian sculptures had to be relocated.
So, we had to decide the strategy for the parking lot. A new building,
with a rough finish, of no architectural interest... a residual space:
a storage area. And that last thought gave us the key. We decided
to move away from the aesthetics and treat the space and the objects
from the scientific point of view, just like an archaeologist would.
So that the discourse would be more evident, we decided to leave
the space as it was, respecting its structure, its rhythm... its soul. We
had already done this on other occasions, with good results, such as
the exhibit “Genes and Food” in Aveiro and Coimbra, in which
case, the dialogue between the content space and the exhibit space
was based on the contrast of opposites: arid-smooth, darkness-light,
rough-smooth, heavy-light weight... opaque-translucent. In this
case, the risk was greater because it would be a permanent exhibit!
This space establishes the structure of the discourse. Of all the options
we had, we decided to work with the one that organized the
space with respect to the north-south axes. The exhibit area would
be divided into six zones, which corresponded to the six “flowerpots”
for the palm trees. Starting from the east, the first sector connected
with the entry. The location of the desks and the access ramp
made this narrower than the rest. An empty space is made up of the
next five sections, organized with pillars and divided into to heights
from the ground up.
Another element that denoted the intervention was the medieval
wall. By transferring the archaeological museum to that zone,
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