Media: El Independiente.com
Original title: El paraíso contra el ladrillo de Vicente Todolí: “En Valencia somos de un pasito para delante y dos para atrás”
Author: Francisco Carrión
Date: March 26th, 2025
A leading figure in contemporary art, the Spaniard who once directed London’s Tate Modern has created a garden with 500 varieties of citrus fruits in his hometown.
“I’ve already built museums for others. This is my museum. Here, there’s no need to change the exhibitions because they change on their own,” says Vicente Todolí as he walks among citrus trees, from citrons, limes, and grapefruits to mandarins, bergamots, and blood oranges. It’s his universe, one of mutations, grafts, and hybridizations, ever since he left the artistic direction of London’s Tate Modern, the “garden orchard” that he, as the fifth-generation representative of a family of citrus growers, saved “in extremis” from the urban depredation that has mutilated the landscapes of the Spanish Levant.
“When I lived in Porto and later in London, I would return to Palmera for a few days every month. I need to touch ground so as not to lose myself in fiction,” acknowledges Todolí (Palmera, 1958), the most universal Spanish curator of contemporary art who swapped the Turbine Hall on the banks of the Thames for the irrigation ditches, terraces, and scent of orange blossoms of his hometown, where he now grows more than 500 varieties of citrus fruits.
Mission: to abort a housing development
His orchard, named Todolí Citrus, is right next to the urban street map of Palmera, a town of a thousand inhabitants located in the Safor region, on the border between the province of Valencia and Alicante. “I feel part of this space more than any other, the territory delimited by the Mondúber, Safor, and Montgó mountains, with the Mediterranean Sea to the east, where the sun rises, and Mount Benicadell to the west,” Todolí explains in “I Wish to Create a Garden (and Watch It Grow),” the book published by Espasa that brings together his professional career—from Valencia to New York and his journey through the IVAM and Serralves—and his return to the land.
An existence “between art and the land” that has found its definitive symbiosis in the geography of Palmera. “We’re in the garden. Here we can do whatever we want. Here we’re free,” Todolí comments at the start of the conversation with El Independiente. He makes no secret of the fact that this is his “paradise,” that paerdís (fenced) in Persian from which the word comes. An oasis, just like the citrus collection they inaugurated in 1573 was for the Médici. “For me, the city is work. I only go to cities for that, for work. But paradise is here. The extreme beauty housed in London’s Tate Modern and that found in the Palmera citrus estate, in the heart of the Mediterranean, are comparable,” he suggests in his essay.
“I wanted to protect it from the voracity of urban development. I don’t have children, so it’s about paying homage to my family and leaving a kind of legacy.”
In fact, his adventure began more than fifteen years ago. In 2007, four years after his father’s death, he bought a rubra citron lemon tree at a flea market on the island of Ischia. “At the airport, I packed it in the largest suitcase I could buy so I could bring it back. So that was the first citrus fruit in the collection.” By 2000, he had planted the first palm trees, which now stand out against the backdrop of orange and lemon groves. He added to the inherited orchard by purchasing a property owned by a neighbor. Just over half a hectare, he expanded it when he heard about the threat of a development plan. “I discovered that a massive urban development was being planned on the surrounding land, affecting the family’s land and their neighbors’. So I went to see the mayor and proposed an idea to stop this project: ‘build’ a citrus garden. To recover the history of that area, nothing more. I wanted to protect it from the voracity of urban development. I don’t have children, so it’s about paying tribute to my family and leaving a kind of legacy. The trees will be my offspring.”
- You said this garden has been your personal salvation. “Because salvation necessarily has to do with solitude. I don’t believe in collective salvation, but rather in the sum of individual salvations,” you wrote…
- Exactly. It’s a salvation, and I hope that, as a legacy, it will also be a salvation for other people. That in times of stormy seas, this will be a place where you feel safe, a refuge from the hostility of the world. That’s what gardens are, and one planted by yourself is the best. When I lived in Valencia, I went to the Botanical Garden, and in London, to St. James’s Park. That’s where all my ideas came from. Having your own garden is a way of fighting mortality. It’s something that transcends time.
- In the book, you admiringly confess that “in Tuscany, they’ve always been clear that preserving the land is their best heritage.” You add: “Among Valencians, that doesn’t happen.”
- It also happens in Sicily and from Naples on down. People are only interested in immediate economic gain. Agriculture is also gardening and has an aesthetic component. Just as if you’re born and don’t move, your senses become numb; perhaps being born here makes you have the skin of an elephant. I couldn’t have an abandoned garden. It’s a lack of culture, a word, by the way, that comes from cultivation. For a long time here in Valencia, a developer would come to the city hall; he’d present an urban plan with properties that weren’t even his. The city hall would accept it, and then they’d move in with machinery; they’d put in those streetlights and huge streets. A law was used that was designed for undeveloped plots of land in the city. Once the law is made, the trap is set.
“If you show an idiot the moon, they’ll look at your finger.”
Todolí says that not even the explosion of the real estate boom changed the epidemic that has cemented the coast, the Mediterranean that can be sensed from Palmera. “We’re not learning anything. Suddenly, the industries in the area started closing because they were making more money becoming real estate developers. After the 2008 crisis, they were waiting for the cycle to change. They’ll probably think I’m crazy. They’ll say, ‘How can this guy have something that isn’t meant to make a profit?’ I think we have to lead by example. I wish more people had their 800-square-meter gardens.”
In the pages of I Wish to Create a Garden, Todolí declares war on “short-termism” and the specter of misunderstood progress. “Give me today, because tomorrow I don’t know if I’ll be here. It’s been like this my whole life. I hope it won’t be like this forever. The supporters of this predatory urbanism told me that they could do whatever they wanted with their land, and no: you inherit the land, not a plot of land, which is obliterated, annihilated land; therefore, you have the obligation to pass it on as living land to the next generations. Each generation must use as little as possible so that those who come after can make their own decisions,” he writes.
In this dissection of Valencia —he opens the prologue by quoting Rafael Chirbes—he devotes a chapter to his time at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art (IVAM) and that bitter end, entangled in “politicking”….
- Valencia has always been one step forward and two steps back. It’s short-sightedness, myopia… If you ask someone here if they want 100 euros today or 500 in a week, the response will be: ‘Today, tomorrow I might be dead.’ There’s also the saying que vinga al darrera, que arree (Whoever comes behind, let him drive). They look at the immediate profit. Show an idiot the moon and he’ll look at you. It’s confusing value and price.
- He left in Zaplana‘s Valencia and now lives in Mazón‘s…
- I think they were friends, right? I’ve become very distant. Now when I go to a restaurant in Valencia, I take a taxi with the button on. I wish the new director of the IVAM a good budget and no political interference.
Of Resistance and Escapism
Holding back to his garden, where he experiments and thrives on silence, Todolí remains connected to contemporary art. Since 2013, he has been the artistic director of the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca museum, on the outskirts of Milan. He accepted the job on the condition that he work from Palmera, with fleeting trips to the Italian city. He also chairs the Botín Foundation’s visual arts advisory committee and advises other private collectors. “I have never advised art investment funds. Commerce doesn’t interest me. It goes against the spirit of art. If you turn an expression of the soul into something productive, it is no longer an expression of the soul, but of the wallet,” he clarifies.
He admits that he “travels more than ever.” This week he is in Milan; he will soon leave for Japan, “the country that best treats and respects citrus fruits.” “I’ve been there a lot; no old variety disappears there; on the contrary, they promote them to keep them alive. Here, on the other hand, there is contempt, apathy, and ignorance; only the newest and most commercial variety sparks interest,” he writes.
Palmera is the beginning and end of all journeys. “This is the base from which I venture out into the world. This place puts you in your place. What makes me most proud is having saved this land. During the COVID pandemic, I would walk between 4 and 6 kilometers through these corridors,” he says, while getting lost among the paths lined with grass, among trees laden with kumquats and branches from which heavy grapefruits hang, propped up by bamboo canes. In the middle of the estate, which he has expanded through acquisitions, there is a small fenced plot of land eaten away by weeds. It is one of the Numantian resistances he has encountered on his return home. “This woman doesn’t want to sell it. ‘I have plenty of money,’ she told me when I went to buy it. There are people who assert themselves by preventing others from doing things,” laments Todolí. His list of resistances also includes an Australian citrus variety—which refuses to grow—and the importation of several Japanese seedlings that ran into bureaucracy.
“There are people who assert themselves by preventing others from doing things.”
“I turned what was a plant storage facility in my parents’ nursery, full of cement walkways that we removed with an excavator, into a garden with multiple varieties of palm trees. I planted smaller palms. At first, it all seemed very empty. Today, more than twenty years later, it already looks like an oasis. Creating a garden is an exercise in patience. They say you don’t plant for yourself, but for future generations, who are the ones who will truly enjoy it in all its splendor,” he says.
- How does Vicente Todolí define himself?
- I have a tendency to escape, for two reasons. One, when I think I know how to do it, why do it? Then I escape. And two, when I encounter an obstruction. Those obstructions have truly nourished me. I see myself as someone very curious, an analyst of the world. I am a reader, I have always been a reader. A reader of the world. And that is what interests me. My driving force is curiosity, and the goal has to be knowledge, not immediate benefit. Benefit, yes, but for my soul, not material. In fact, everything I earn is here.
- I am not afraid that, when I am no longer here, someone will come and dust off the failed urban development project on these lands…
- My hope is that they won’t dare touch a foundation, but you never know. It would be a scandal.
He admits that homelands and nationalisms give him hives. “They say that for writers, the homeland is language. I don’t like the word. I’m not proud of being from anywhere. One is born not where one asks, but where it happens. This is not my homeland, but the place where I think I belong. It doesn’t correspond to any administrative division,” he replies as the interview draws to a close. Todolí believes that if his ancestors were to return from the grave and see him set foot on earth and revel among citrus, pomegranate, and prickly pear trees, “they would be in heaven.” “My uncle died at 97 and saw all this. He always said: ‘If only your grandfather and your father could see it!’ He was moved.”
Long, long ago, is that summer of 1987 when, he says, “the images took hold of him, circulating before his eyes at a dizzying speed.” “I spent many weekends at the family home, in the countryside, among orange trees, but I always wore city clothes, a jacket, and I remember that when I was there, I avoided being touched by tree branches, as if my body were made of glass and the slightest contact could break it. I was still hyper-urban, dominated by the metropolitan maelstrom.” In search of a cure, Todolí went to a therapist in nearby Dénia. His diagnosis was devastating: “Your New York leg is too long and your Palmera leg is too short; we need to balance them.”
What would that therapist say today?
He would say to me: “Vicente, you have achieved the perfect balance.” The earth saves you.
