MARTA
LAGE DE LA ROSA

I have devoted my professional life to the care and protection works of arts from a creative, teacher and researcher perspective. First, as a restorer of a rare material: intaglio engraving plates, from the age of nineteen I was responsible to care engraving plates series by Goya and other collections of the Calcografía Nacional, at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. I was a pioneer, collaborating for five years with a project of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) at the Centro de Estudios Metalúrgicos (CENIM). Both institutions began to research copper plates, as they were the oldest and most numerous. With the crisis of 1993, I went into exile in Mexico for five years, where I had the opportunity to conserve and restore the collection of matrices of the Antigua Academia de San Carlos, as well as working in research and teaching at the Universidad Autónoma de México and the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, at the Escuela de Restauración, Conservación y Museografía, at UNESCO, at the Museo Franz Mayer and at the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso. I had the opportunity to collaborate with magazines and documentary collections as a photographer and to make individual exhibitions and participate in group shows. I returned to Spain to do my Ph degree in Science Materials at the Carlos III University in Madrid, characterising contemporary intaglio zinc for its conservation. I won the extraordinary prize with the thesis and later obtained the prestigious postdoctoral research contract (R+D+I) from the Ministry of Science and Innovation Juan de la Cierva, coming second out of a hundred candidates. Simultaneously, we brought together the three existing Chalcographs in an International Symposium in Madrid, financed by the BBVA Foundation to unify criteria for intervention and preservation of the material. I then obtained the prestigious Rome Grant (MAEC-AECI) to work at the Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica and compare treatments, transferring their system of replicas used in the collections of Piranessi and Morandi to the Spanish Goya series. I also participated as an artist photographer in the exhibition with my generation of scholarship holders in Rome and Madrid. Return to Spain from Rome in 2008 coincided with another economic crisis and due to budgetary difficulties the restoration laboratory of the Calcografía Nacional was definitively dismantled, and so it continues today. Meanwhile, in addition to freelance photographic work for magazines, I had undertaken a Ph degree program in Art Therapy and Art Education for Social Inclusion at the Faculty of Education to continue with my pedagogical and teaching training, realising the capacity of the arts for health care and the importance of education in the development of sensitivity for the care of cultural heritage. What is known and valued is appreciated and cared for. I currently focus my teaching and research activity on education through art, care for cultural heritage and art therapy as a tool for the empowerment of future generations of teachers, social inclusion and the possibility of a sustainable and feminist future. My current creative activity in addition to photography is performing arts, with Vertebradas Artes Escénicas, an inclusive theatre company of which I have been a member for the last five years.