Media: ABC
Original title: El trabajo es una condena; en el paraíso no se trabaja
Author: Bruno Pardo Porto
Date: 26 March 2025
The former director of the Tate Modern in London has created a citrus garden in Palmera, the land where he was born. He says it is his most important museum
Look no further: paradise exists and it is very close to Gandía, in Palmera, the land where sixty-seven years ago Vicente Todolí was born and where today impossible trees grow, as if taken from the imagination of some happy and hedonistic god. Here everything tastes much, more, better. And it has been planted by the man who today walks and says: ‘I don’t have children, I have trees’.
After directing or building museums (the IVAM in Valencia, the Serralves in Oporto, the Tate Modern in London) Todolí has become a gardener, and has planted, here, an Eden of citrus fruits brought from all over the world. There are more than five hundred species. Some, the result of natural mutations, are only true in this dream of twenty degrees in the sun.
Todolí wears a blue coat, a cap and the ash falls off his cigarette when he speaks: he talks a lot, very fast, although he speaks slower than he thinks. He is artistic director of the Museo Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan and is a member of the Botín Foundation’s Advisory Committee for the Visual Arts. And at the same time he has turned the Todolí Citrus Foundation into a place where things never stop happening: film festivals, poetry festivals, haute cuisine meetings, illustrious visits, collaborations with Loewe… Now he tells his life story in “Quisiera crear un jardín (y verlo crecer)” (Espasa), a book of memories and projects and desires, as well as an ode to the landscape in which he was born and where he wants to end his days. He has built a viewpoint to see it better.
-You travel a lot, don’t you?
-Eighty percent of the time I’m travelling. Tomorrow [yesterday] I’m opening an exhibition in Milan, then I come back here and on Saturday I’m going to Japan. For me it’s like commando actions, raids. This is my camp: I go somewhere, do what I have to do and come back. I like to go alone, fast and come back to base.
-This garden is partly from your travels. Do you remember the first tree you bought?
-At a street market on the island of Ischia I saw a citrus tree I had never seen before. Its fruit impressed me [it was a citrus lemon rubra]. I asked if they could pack it for me to take away. When I got to the airport I said: give me the biggest suitcase you have, please. And I planted it here.
-He says in the book that he only does things he likes to do.
-If it’s work, I don’t do it: it has to be passion. That’s why I’m not going to retire. For me, what I do in art, in those moments, is just what I feel like doing. It’s pleasure, it’s play. Work is a condemnation. In paradise you didn’t work.
-But here you will work too.
-I have a lot of “zooms” because I don’t live in Milan, I only go there once a month. So I have meetings with my people, and I always tell them: we talk at the end of the day. Why at the end of the day? Because there is no more natural light. So I can go back inside and work on art. But while there is natural light, I’m here [and points to the garden floor].
-Brines, who lived very close to here, was a child of this light. ‘And how can I return to my life the light / of the morning?’ he wrote in one of his last poems.
-If you are sensitive, this light is not forgotten. Although to appreciate it you have to have distance, you have to have left. Brines lived in Madrid almost all his life, and chose to return here at the end of his days. He came here a lot… When you start to evoke the world of childhood, those sensations, it’s a bit like preparing yourself for the end of life, for death. It’s a way of chasing away the fear of death, which is people’s great terror. And that’s why Marco Martella, the great garden writer, says that a garden is a place where nothing bad can happen to you. In theory.
-Has anything bad happened to you here?
-I’ve fallen in ditches [and laughs]. I almost broke my foot in the ditches [and laughs].
-What part of your work in art did you dislike?
-At the Tate there were committees, I had to negotiate a lot. I don’t like that. I have a friend who used to say: don’t advise me, I prefer to make mistakes on my own. After the Tate I made that decision: I prefer to be wrong on my own.
-By the way, you don’t drink juice outside, do you?
-Oh no, no, no, it’s impossible [and he laughs]. I travel with my fruit, I always eat my fruit for breakfast. The greatest pleasure is to eat what you have created.
-You say that paradise was a citrus garden. Rilke also said that paradise was childhood. Here the two things come together.
-It’s like Orson Welles’ Rosebud. It’s a utopia, because the return to childhood is also a utopia, because that moment will never be reproduced, but it is something that nourishes me. In Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood”, there is a fantastic scene that has influenced me a lot. He is a boy who fights against the Nazis, who has no life, but he dreams that he is on a beach, riding in a cart loaded with apples with a blonde girl, his love, and as he goes along the apples fall on the sand… Gardens are places where the imagination is triggered. They are platforms to the past, to the present and to the future.
-Is a garden anything like a museum?
-An artist told me: this is your most important museum [and pauses]. The word culture comes from cultivation, and works need care, just like trees. The important thing is that a museum is something you don’t do for today, that doesn’t have immediate effects. It’s the same with gardens: agriculture imposes its rhythm on you. In fact, when you plant a garden, it’s disappointing at first: the trees are tiny and the landscape is empty. And there is this temptation for people with money to say: I’ll plant big trees closer together and that’s it. But in the end they have to cut them down because they disturb each other. It’s the same with art collections. You have to think, let them show you where to go.
-Do you bring a lot of artists to the garden to convince them of a project?
-I bring them in as a reward afterwards. For example, Shimabuku, who did an exhibition at the Centro Botín. He came here and then took me to see citrus fruits on the island of Okinawa (…). When artists come here, they are amazed. It’s a world parallel to their own.
-Is contemporary art very urban?
-It is, it is. And I was hyper-urban when I was in New York, but I gave it up, and that’s why I try to be in the cities in the best possible time and do everything very fast. My father was also anti-urban. He said that in cities you couldn’t breathe, that there were miasmas. He went on a trip once, when he got married, on his wedding trip. After that he never travelled again.
-The history of art is full of citrus fruits. Why?
-The world of citrus fruits has exerted a great magnetism, especially on the people of the north. Citrus fruits are the fruits of the winter sun, and that winter sun is what exists in the north. When they came to the south it became light again. That’s why artists always went south: Picasso, Matisse… The German and French Nazarenes went to Rome for the past, but also for the light. They were looking for this light (…) Mediterranean culture is citrus fruits, vines, olive trees and almond trees. But of all these, citrus fruits have the most variety: that’s what really attracted the world of culture.
-Which would you leave first: art or the garden?
-Of course I would leave art. The garden never, the garden is my life. It’s the place where I belong. I won’t give up art either because I like it, but at some point I’ll start giving up work. My idea is to devote more and more time to the garden and less and less to institutions.
