The Cabo Mayor Faro Center inaugurated its new facilities on Friday, October 19 at 7:00 p.m. A new exhibition, stores and spaces for workshops or other activities come to complete the global project of this space owned by the Santander Port Authority, which opened to the public in August 2006.
The opening ceremony was presenting with the book by Eduardo Sanz ‘Cachón with Potatoes’, published by Ediciones La Bahía and the ‘Port’ exhibition, a selection of works from the art collection of the Port Authority of Santander.
Faro Major Faro Center
The Cabo Mayor Faro Center has a total area of 740 meters, of which, with this extension, 375 are destined to an exhibition zone distributed in 5 rooms. This space arose as a cultural initiative promoted by the Port Authority of Santander and aimed at providing the capital of Cantabria with a new museum committed to the dissemination, interpretation and preservation of creations inspired by the sea. The installation is based on the strong symbolic, landscape and architectural presence of the Cabo Mayor, and the exceptional collection of works of art, objects and curiosities related to the sea and the headlights, which the painter Eduardo Sanz has gathered throughout of the years.
The center has five rooms distributed between the base of the Faro tower and its annexed buildings. In the ‘Cabo Mayor’ room, the central nucleus of the collection lies, a careful selection of the works of Eduardo Sanz himself dedicated to the main headlights and landscapes of the Spanish coast. The ‘Cabo Menor’ room houses a select representation of the Spanish artistic avant -garde of the second half of the twentieth century in all supports and techniques, articulated around the theme of the lighthouse. In the ‘Anular’ room, an original approach to the world of headlights is offered, through anthropological, cultural and technological referents, through the iconography that these infrastructure have generated on different supports; Jewelery, canning packaging, textile products or dioramas, including its stimulating role in the childhood imaginary. The ‘Isla de Mouro’ Chamber is responsible for hosting the temporal exhibitions that, until 2012, have been 13 samples. To these are joined from tomorrow a new room.
To date, this center has passed more than 250,000 visitors, with an annual average of 50,000 people, although, this year until September more than 70,000 visitors had already been counted.
‘Port’. ARTE OF THE PORTUARY AUTHORITY OF SANTANDER
‘Portuaria’, which is presented for the first time, is a selection of the collection of works of art that the Port Authority has gathered over more than 25 years of cultural activities carried out in rehabilitated port spaces for this purpose, especially; Palace del Embarcadero, Sala Naos (Sotoliva) and Faro Cabo Mayor.
Most of the works that make up the collection, approximately 80 pieces, are donations by artists or consequence of the production of exhibition projects, including: 'Port city activity', Jesús Avecilla, Victoria Civera, Eduardo Gruber, Juan Uslé and Xesús Vázquez; ‘Equivalences’, Cico Gutierrez, Joge Fernández, Luis Oti and Pedro F. Palazuelos; ‘Ars’, Txomin Badiola, Ashley Bickerton, Victoria Civera, Pello Irazu and Jon Kessler.
The criteria followed for the selection of the exposed works has been, on the one hand, that its dimensions were adequate to space, and, on the other, the existence of a referential element to the sea or maritime-port activity. The works that can be seen are by Jesús Avecilla, Victoria Civera, Pilar G. Cossio, Jorge Fernández, Joan Fontcuberta, Cico Gutiérrez, Ángel de la Hoz, Javier Lasén, Michel Quijorna, Francisco Rodríguez, Santiago Sagredo, Luis Oti, Juan Uslé , Xesús Vázquez and Javier Vila
The exhibition is complemented by a sample of catalogs and projections that collect both the rest of the collection and other exhibitions made since 1985.