The Tito Bustillo Cave is one of the world’s most important Palaeolithic sites and is included on the UNESCO World Heritage List along with another four caves in Asturias and nine caves spread across Cantabria and the Basque Country.
The need to preserve this ancient legacy and the difficulty of providing public access to its most emblematic spaces prompted the creation of the Tito Bustillo Cave Art Centre, the mission of which is to promote a knowledge and understanding of these prehistoric art forms in the context of similar manifestations in Asturias.
The exhibition includes reconstructions of the most emblematic spaces in the cave such as the Gallery of Anthropomorphic Figures or Horses and the Chamber of Vulvas. 3D scanning, working with CNC machines and the use of composites with finishes based on natural pigments were some of the methods used to produce the replicas. To reconstruct the cave, we used metal structures with varying profiles, polyurethane foams, metal meshes and pumped thixotropic mortars.
The exhibition design aimed to lend a unique character to the different thematic areas by clearly differentiating the spaces within a coherent itinerary, ranging from conceptualisation, abstraction and evocation to the realism of scenographic elements like the cave itself. The varied forms and designs of the display structures create a dynamic and didactic visual language built around unconventional triangular-shaped showcases that act as props themselves for the scenography and contain replicas of the artefacts in the Tito Bustillo Cave: ornaments like seashells, decorated tools such as harpoons, batons and scrapers, and stone tablets engraved with similar motifs to the ones that cover the cave walls.
