Eina lecturer and researcher Lara García Díaz will participate next Friday, 8 May 2026, in a lecture at the University of Valencia entitled “Levantar el suelo: Material Archive, Spectrality and Design through the Ground”. The session will take place from 9:45 am to 11:00 am in the Assembly Hall of the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Sciences.
Framed within the European SIT-PLU project, Levantar el suelo is an artistic and design research project developed in collaboration with María García Ruiz around the concrete courtyard of Eina Bosc. The research begins with a specific material gesture — partially lifting the concrete ground surface — in order to open up a reflection on the historical, institutional, material and ecological layers that remain sealed beneath that surface.
Through this intervention, the lecture proposes thinking about the ground not as a neutral support, but as a material archive, a nearby ruin, a spectral space and a geology in transformation. In dialogue with thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida and Timothy Morton, the research explores how the past does not emerge as a linear and continuous narrative, but rather through fragments, remains, traces and forms of persistence that continue to shape the present.
The project incorporates practices such as frottage, ground-penetrating radar and three-dimensional visualisation of subsurface data in order to test new forms of critical attention. Rather than resolving or pacifying the intervened site, Levantar el suelo seeks to transform the conditions through which this space may be perceived, thought and interpreted.
With this proposal, Lara García Díaz reflects on how a critical aesthetics of the ground can open up new forms of responsibility towards the memories, damages and ecologies that sustain seemingly ordinary spaces.