The Hortensia Herrero Center, an oasis for international art in Valencia

It looks like a Japanese village stuck in the Middle Ages, with peasants and samurai wandering around, absorbed in their daily tasks or resting on a bench, children playing, and entire families participating in a ritual or gazing at a fireworks display. Some have even seen the Bogeyman on rainy days. Now the sun is blazing, but as the afternoon progresses, the village will darken and the houses will fill with lanterns. Because The World of Irreversible Change, the fascinating digital fresco by the Japanese collective teamLab, is connected to the weather and the passage of time in the cities where it is exhibited, such that the landscape will change with the passing of the seasons. From the bursting of cherry blossoms in spring to the golden carpets of parks in autumn. If it's pouring with rain outside, the tiny figures will run for shelter from the downpour. On those occasions, some claim to have seen the Bogeyman emerge.

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The World of Irreversible Change is like contemplating life inside an aquarium, changing behavior as we approach. But beware! If we touch the screen or interact insistently, we would disrupt the harmony and provoke clashes between the inhabitants, who would then engage in an all-out war, with the samurai cutting off heads and reducing the world around them to ashes. There would be no turning back, and with human life extinguished, vegetation would take over the ruins. Hence the title, The World of Irreversible Change. Everything we do has consequences: if we cause damage or unleash a war, nothing will ever be the same again.

The delicate work of teamLab, the successful Japanese association of artists and engineers that attracts crowds around the world with its interactive art exhibitions, has also become one of the biggest attractions of the Hortensia Herrero Art Center (CAHH) since its opening in November 2023. The security guards have spotted a figure looking into the visitor's eyes and provoking: "Touch me, touch me." "At some point we let someone do it, so they see that it's an interactive work, but always with great restraint to avoid unleashing a war," says curator and art critic Javier Molins, artistic director of a center that The New York Times highly valued when choosing Valencia as one of the 52 best destinations in the world in 2024.

The Valeriola Palace, which encapsulates the entire history of Valencia, adds its appeal to that of the collection of the vice president of Mercadona.

More than 300,000 people have already visited the CAHH in the splendid Valeriola Palace, a building whose appeal is further enhanced by the art collection of the vice president of Mercadona, featuring some 100 works by some of the most sought-after international contemporary artists. From David Hockney and Anselm Kiefer to Olafur Eliasson, Andreas Gursky, Eduardo Chillida, Tàpies, Alexander Calder, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and Mat Collishaw.

The collection's story begins in Dallas, when Hortensia Herrero and Javier Molins met on a trip to visit a Sorolla exhibition at the Meadows Museum. "She had a vocation as a patron. Through the foundation that bears her name, she was working on heritage restoration and other dance-related projects. She wanted to do something with art but wasn't quite sure how to channel it. She told me she was thinking about the possibility of opening a museum with Valencian artists one day. I had just met her, and I told her she could do whatever she wanted with her money, but that it didn't seem like a good idea to me. That the good ones were already represented in museums, and that perhaps instead of thinking about Valencian artists, she should think about the citizens of Valencia, bringing to those who can't travel, the works of great international artists who exhibit in Paris, London, or New York, but rarely here," Molins recalls.

The former director of the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid began advising her privately on her homes until the collector acquired a monumental work by Anselm Kiefer based on Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal , and Molins told her that such a piece could not be in a private home away from public view. "The choice of the Valeriola Palace, which was in a state of disrepair, is related to her desire to restore heritage and return it to the city, something she has already done in buildings such as the Church of San Nicolás and the Colegio del Arte Mayor de la Seda. In addition, it served as a place to display her collection, so she killed two birds with one stone," notes Alejandra Silvestre, director of the Hortensia Herrero Foundation. "Besides, there was no need to go to an industrial warehouse on the outskirts; it was in the center, where the people are," Molins adds.

The response has been extraordinary. Of the 300,000 visitors, 60% were citizens of Valencia, 30% were international visitors, and 10% were from the rest of Spain. That Kiefer painting hangs today, along with two other colossal works by the painting titan, in the palace's main hall. The windows are open so that visitors can see the city they are in, with constant reminders of what it once was: a 17th-century mosaic, an Arab fountain, remains of the ancient Roman circus...

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Inspired by that chapter in the building's history, Mat Collishaw, who was part of the YBA (Young British Artists) group with Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, created Left in Dust, a circular LED screen suspended from the ceiling featuring horses trotting before an excited crowd. Collishaw himself designed a second, immersive video installation for the center, centered around the Fallas.

These are some of the site-specific works created especially for the palace that lend the project its uniqueness and define its personality. Already in the spectacular lobby, we find the poetic colored clouds or soap bubbles by Tomás Saraceno, which, like the teamLab work, offer infinite iridescence depending on the time of day or the light, and also the alphabets of letters by Jaume Plensa tangling around the walls like ivy. Olafur Eliasson has designed a tunnel with 1,035 pieces of glass in all the colors of the rainbow that we can only see on the way there; on the way back, everything is darkness. Sean Scully has intervened in the old chapel, and Cristina Iglesias has connected the palace with a new building attached to the courtyard through a narrow mineral landscape.