From Tate to citrus cultivation_Expansión

With his box of oil bottles, Vicente Todolí turned up one winter afternoon about ten years ago at the elBullifoundation’s headquarters on Calle México in Barcelona. He was going to visit his friend Ferran Adrià, who is largely to blame for the ex-director of the Tate Modern turning to the world of citrus fruits. ‘My first project was in the nineties, when I bought a farm in the Gallinera Valley, in the mountains of Alicante. It was abandoned; I used to ride my motorbike or walk around the area and I imagined what it would be like in twenty years’ time if I bought it and restored it. The idea was not to make oil, it was to restore the land. I looked around and thought it could be devoted to olive trees. My first project had to do with restoring and defending the land. Making oil was just a consequence’, says Vicente Todolí (Palmera, 1958), in an interview with EXPANSIÓN.

From that came Tot Oli extra virgin olive oil, which he took on his visit to the chef at elBulli and whose approach, in reality, was not so different from the professional career for which Todolí was better known. ‘Thinking about it afterwards, they are projects that you build almost like a museum, like a collection, you link them little by little and, in the end, there is a result’, reflects this contemporary art curator, who has directed several museums and art centres in the world, such as the Valencian IVAM, the Serralves Foundation (Oporto) or the Tate (London) -he directed each one for seven years.

Citriculture
The vision of the farm that led to oil production was the seed of what came later. ‘I am the fifth generation of a family specialised in citriculture. It is not that they produced, but that they supplied trees to the farmers. My father had his own orchards; he bought the first one when he was 12, because he started working at the age of 10. As the first-born, I had to follow that tradition’, says Todolí, who began by buying a neighbour’s orchard, while he feared that the land in Palmera, his home town, was being abandoned.

In the middle, Ferran Adrià, whose participation in Documenta Kassel (2007) Todolí and the painter Richard Hamilton reflected on in the book Food for Thought (2009). ‘In 2010, we made a trip to an orchard in Perpignan, where they grew hundreds of varieties of citrus fruits in pots, which they took out into the open air in spring and stored in October. How is it possible that they could do it there and in Valencia, which is a perfect place for citrus fruits, we didn’t think about it? Ferran said to me, ‘Why don’t I do something about it? That would be a way of reactivating the orchard’, Todolí reasons.

This discreet expert in contemporary art already had about 20 citrus varieties in Palmera. ‘In 2011, I started buying in a planned way, as I was researching citrus. There was an urban development plan in place and many farms were going to be destroyed. I spoke to the mayor and proposed creating a foundation’. Thus was born Todolí Citrus Fundaciò, a non-profit organisation ‘created for the study and dissemination of citrus fruits and citriculture’. According to Todolí, ‘it arose out of the need to protect the land and the landscape. If years ago my aim was to restore, now it is to protect’.

Through his foundation, he brings together his own land, his family’s land and land bought from 24 neighbours, to reach a collection of 500 varieties of citrus fruit in El Bartolí. ‘It is a non-commercial garden,’ he explains. ‘We only sell surplus citrus fruit; the trees are so heavy that they can break or become exhausted.

So how does it work? First, ‘the background is to fight against land abandonment; what we do could be an example for abandoned orchards to put them into production’. Secondly, it is about research and dissemination, so it is possible to visit the farm between November and April on Saturdays on guided tours for a maximum of 20-25 people. There are four hectares of visitable area, plus another half hectare for a new project with the Valencian Institute of Agricultural Research and another hectare and a half more.

Gastronomic laboratory
Todolí could not renounce an artistic approach to his citrus orchard. ‘As I did my research, I realised the mistakes I had made, both scientifically and artistically. I commissioned an architect [Carlos Salazar’s studio] to turn my father’s tool shed into a laboratory for gastronomic and essential oil research, with the advice of Ferran [Adrià], with the idea that it would be a place where any chef could do research’.
BartolíLab is the Todolí Citrus Gastronomic Laboratory -which adds a Citrus Classroom and a library-. Among others, Todolí Citrus has worked with Quique Dacosta (seven Michelin stars), Ricard Camarena, Albert Adrià or the pastry chef Ausiàs Sig- nes, although ‘curiously, the project has interested more Italians or English people’. The London businesses The Clove Club and Toklas Bakery, which months ago created a special menu ‘to celebrate the final harvest of the citrus season in Palmera’, have also made use of the Valencian garden. Frenchman Bruno Verjus is also a good user, a multifaceted chef who has just placed Table (Paris) as the tenth restaurant in the world.

There are many projects that link this foundation with gastronomy. Pop-ups that allow you to try their citrus fruits in different places in Europe; twenty types of jams ‘as a kind of encyclopaedia to learn while tasting, which we don’t make ourselves, but we do sell them on our website’; or artisan brands of gin or chocolate that use their products. ‘We are open to collaborations,’ confirms Todolí. ‘The aim is for the foundation to have income so that it can be sustainable in the future,’ he adds.

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