La Ruta
Bombas Gens centre d’arts / Layers of Reality / 2025
exhibition design / text writing / general consulting
The exhibition revisits, for the first time in an immersive format, the socio-cultural movement that propelled Valencia to the forefront of the European avant-garde in the 1980s: La Ruta Destroy. It highlights the movement's creative power, its modern, libertarian, and transgressive spirit, as well as its autonomy from institutions. La Ruta was the most visible and radical manifestation of the Valencian cultural movement, with a force and personality comparable to other major urban scenes such as Manchester, Berlin, or Amsterdam.
The exhibition combines historical archives and contemporary creations. Various creative teams from Valencia participate, occupying the entire center, which is organized into nine distinct spaces within the different—formerly industrial—buildings. The museological concept seeks to replicate the experience of a night of revelry, traversing different spaces and atmospheres that make up the various scenes. This recreates the fascination of a night in constant motion and spatial change: city, record store, highway, rice paddies, parking lot, nightclubs, drug lab... The project addresses the architectural and museographic design of some of these spaces.
Curator
Artur Duart
Coordination from the center
Mónica Pérez, Manuel Conde
Other creative teams
Democracia (graphic identity), Radiante + Vitamin (immersive room), Marta Moreira (documentation and content writing)
Photographs
David Zarzoso, Ricardo Ruíz
The Labyrinth of Creations reveals part of the creative universe of Ruta Destroy, integrating information about its architecture, fashion, and graphic design, as well as a series of reviews and anecdotes in the form of texts that float on its walls. The proposal seeks to emulate the feeling of loss experienced during a night out while wandering through a nightclub. The labyrinthine architecture recreates this sense of discovery, freedom, play, and chaos; it is the psychological path that gives rise to creativity and fantasy. At the same time, the geometry of the arches—which frees the ground plane and rigidifies the structure—evokes a temple-like image, contributing to the sacralization of what occurs within. The user must choose between different paths and possibilities, making them a participant in a shared creativity, freedom, and discovery.
The architectural references for the geometric solution primarily draw from constructions that generate labyrinthine and fractal landscapes through the repetition of elements. The space adopts the colors of parking signage that guide the exhibition, with red dominating the scene, symbolizing excitement, danger, and desire. The mirrors that blur and multiply the space, the screens hidden behind one-way mirrors that display video clips, as well as the art installations within, transform this multi-curve labyrinth into an ongoing game of creativity and cross-references.
The entire structure is made of wood and is designed as a catalog-game of modular, demountable pieces, as the joints are made with screws. The game offers endless combinations, while also allowing for easy assembly and disassembly for the exhibition's itinerant nature and adaptation to spaces of varying shapes.
Fashion installation
Francis Montesinos
Video capsules
Pepe Ábalos
Construction
Santiandrés
This space recreates the interior atmosphere of a record store: with a central record cabinet and walls covered in original posters from the era. The posters are arranged in an intentionally chaotic manner, evoking the spontaneous and vibrant character of those record stores. Two large entrance and exit doors, conceived as visual icons, mark and define this warmer area within the exhibition space. The color scheme maintains the dominant red of this area, incorporating two shades of traffic green that are a nod to the color of the furniture in the legendary Zic-Zac import record store, an essential place to understand the musical effervescence of that time.
Music selection
Antonio J. Albertos (HAL 9000)
Construction
Santiandrés
The space ‘In Ecstasy’—a title alluding to the mythical essay—is the quintessential space of play, fantasy, and danger within the exhibition. In this gallery-laboratory, visitors are immersed in a hallucinogenic atmosphere, suspended between reality and dreams.
Black light transforms the white balloons that flood the space into bluish spheres, which include labels describing the effects (positive and negative) of the substances displayed on the walls, like a gallery of chemical paintings. Meanwhile, large green balloons float on the ceiling, metaphors for mescaline capsules—the emblematic drug of this story—whose formula remains a secret. The scene is framed by two green plastic laboratory curtains featuring the icons used in the "If you go too far, you'll miss out" campaign, developed by the NGO Controla Club in collaboration with the Valencian Regional Government in 2009. The game concludes with a final gesture: the balloons—so soft and playful at first—finally burst, releasing the emotions and fantasies they had contained.
Air balloon production
David Orrico
Frames design
Rial
