Media: Levante
Original title: El ‘Autorretrato’ de Todolí
Author: Amparo Barbeta
Date: 26 de marzo 2025
Vicent Todolí, former head of exhibitions at IVAM, confesses in Quisiera crear un jardín (y verlo crecer) that he created the Todolí Citrus Fundació to ‘stop an urban development plan’. An orchard that, he considers, ‘can be an example of how to alleviate the abandonment of land with varieties destined for small markets’. This small agricultural space, or better to call it a paradise, is in Palmera, some five kilometres from Gandía and seventy from Valencia. A 45,000-metre orchard where guided tours are organised to smell its blossoms and taste its fruits and whose produce is sold to nearby restaurants and is also used to make jams and chocolates. ‘It’s my passion,’ the art expert prides himself. ‘It’s a museum made for me’, he points out, surrounded by trees. The Todolí is also a space that houses publications, prints, posters, engravings and other materials on the history of citrus growing, where poetry readings are held, open-air films by avant-garde creators are shown and gastronomic competitions are held for new chefs to incorporate citrus fruits into their recipes. This is the Eden in which Todolí feels at home and in which he has created the book that goes on sale today.
The pleasure lies,‘ he explains, ’in buying abandoned land to turn it into your own garden. Land, on which Todolí prides himself, everything is ‘organic’. “I knew nothing about the history and tradition of citriculture. First I started planting and then I started researching. Contrary to what one should do with an art collection‘, explains the now director of the artistic programme of the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan who, after travelling the world, has settled permanently in the village where he was born in order to, as Juan Lagardera explains in the book’s prologue, ’recover the landscape of his childhood and early youth, and, at the same time, understand that his land was historically the place from which citrus culture spread to the whole of Europe”.
“I like to define this orchard as a museum, as a garden museum where a tour and a multisensory experience come together. It is designed as a visit that appeals to all your senses and imposes a rhythm on you. It is a living museum, where it is not necessary to periodically renew the presentation of the collection because it changes every moment. And it all began with the purchase of several plots of land to avoid a housing development, explains Todolí (1958) who, in the book, gives a first-person account of his personal and professional career and, among many other curiosities, talks about his obsession with natural light and turning off lights, his displeasure at the Tate Modern and how he joined the IVAM in October 1985 (it opened in February 1989) and how he advised Jose Luis Soler to create his art collection and exhibit it at the Bombas Gens factory.
Citrus Collection
“The ultimate goal of Todolí Citrus goes far beyond creating a citrus collection: it’s about defending the landscape model with a productive framework that has remained intact since the 19th century and has its roots in the 10th and 11th centuries,” he proudly states after revealing that more than 500 varieties of citrus are grown in his paradise, one of the largest private collections of citrus trees planted in the ground in the world. “An open-air museum of trees whose permanent collection is always changing,” he notes. “I collect citrus fruits rather than works of art, as befits my primary profession. But not out of a collector’s zeal, but rather to learn, out of individual curiosity. I do it because I’m interested, because it hasn’t been done before, and I want to know more,” he shares, after confessing that, for him, each tree is “like a child” and tending the orchard is “an active break” during which he only stays still “during siesta time.”
The Origin of Museums
“Vicent Todolí feels part of that past that, encouraged by the Medici family and the Neoplatonic humanists of the Renaissance, incorporated the value of collecting into botany. Art and nature converge once again and give coherence to the evolution of modern cultural relationships with objects created by man or in which man has barely intervened. Gardening is thus linked to cabinets of wonders or curiosities, which, in turn, are the origins of museums, to which Vicente Todolí has dedicated his entire professional life,” Lagardera recounts in the book’s preamble.
