Drawing inspiration from the industrial environment of Sorigué’s gravel pit in Lleida, the location of the firm’s PLANTA project, the installation In the Beginning was… is an installation created expressly for the place by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (Osaka, 1972). It was her first time to use stone as an art material, extracted from the actual mine of the site to allude to the concept of origin. On the one hand, the origin of the universe: the dense mesh of strings and stones evoking the cosmos. On the other hand, the origin of the corporate group Sorigué, with its link to earthworks.

Shiota usually weaves complex webs of threads to explore the relationship between memory and loss and the strings that connect us, knots and splits. In the Beginning… wraps up a project that was launched in 2015 with the Fundació Sorigué’s temporary exhibition of the same title. The new site-specific installation has a home in PLANTA alongside works by William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Bill Viola, Antonio López, and Juan Muñoz.