So it was... Red Itiner 2020

El Rastro is an iconic place in Madrid that brings together ruins and objects of all kinds, most of which have already enjoyed one or more lives. They are objects that accumulate experiences and memories in the form of dust, marks of use or the presence of images. The "Archivo Rastro" exhibition is a project that arose from the appropriation and intervention, by various artists, of a photographic archive generated from the purchase, digitalization and cataloging of negatives and slides found in El Rastro in Madrid.

The more than 3.000 images that made up the archive, which originally corresponded to different formats – slides, 35 mm negatives, medium format and stereoscopic photography, among others – were given to various artists with the idea of ​​investigating the relationship created between the provider of a tool and the author. Thus, the artists Ferran Pla, Cristina de Middel, Miguel Ángel Tornero, Antonio M. Xoubanova, Colectivo PIPOL and Nicholas F. Callaway gave a new meaning and sense to the images, bringing them back to life after being in a latent state within the Rastro.

Commissioners: Louis-Charles Tiar, Cati Bestard and Marta Sesé

This exhibition consisted of a selection of photographs by Benito Román, an authentic portrait of a decade in which Spaniards discovered faith in themselves. The political instrument was the promulgation of the law of laws, the Constitution, which, despite different criteria of acceptance, constituted the authentic unifying force of a society eager for harmony in the new political horizon.

In the historical evolution of the last century it is difficult to find a time so full of social, economic and political changes that turned a time of dictatorial darkness into a light of democratic and festive emotions. At that time, Benito Román, as a press photographer, insisted on recording the day to day of apparently insubstantial events that, however, the stitching of time and the cement of memory have turned into the best graphic account of the sociopolitical change of this country.

The portrait obtained depicted the Madrid region as a mirror of all Spains, a unifying force of shanty towns and skyscrapers, trade unionists and employers, lay people and religious people, heroes and villains, whom the sieve of time has transformed into friendly protagonists of the differences overcome in that ordeal. A revaluation of politics as the administration of collective generosity that was forged in the Constitution, a sentimental walk through our memory and a recognition of socioeconomic progress, often forgotten in the din of daily immediacy.

Commissar: Chema Conesa

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), a writer who, due to the time in which he lived, witnessed events that would be crucial for the modernity of his country, England, such as the development of a mentality that questioned the authority of ancient wisdom or the beginning of the political hegemony of that country. It was also a time of boom in great voyages to the most remote places on the globe that allowed Europeans to see different landscapes, flora, fauna and cultures, and compare them with their own. In this context, he wrote "Lemuel Gulliver's Travels to Several Remote Nations of the World", published in 1726 and known as "Gulliver's Travels".

This book, the most famous of its author, is dominated by relativism and deep pessimism endowed with a certain sense of humor. It is considered an adventure novel that, like "Don Quixote", allowed a double reading and immediate popularity, reaching three editions in one year. In 2004, the painter Guillermo Pérez Villalta received from the Editorial Galaxia Gutenberg and Círculo de Lectores the commission to make the 100 illustrations for an edition of the great classic, a publication that he carried out reflecting its dimension of fantastic narration and whose originals are shown in this temporal exposition.

The hundred watercolours were able to capture the essence of Swift's text, which is more than a classic work of youth literature, it is a modern political, moral and social satire. The attention to detail, the flight of imagination and the mix of formal beauty and surprising stories make this series of watercolours an exhibition project that combines literature, art, education and entertainment.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta belongs to the group of painters of the so-called New Madrilenian Figuration. Emerged in the 70s, it was made up of a majority of Andalusians educated in Madrid. His painting has gone through many moments, from the investigation of his own biography, the use of classical and Christian mythologies, etc. To this, it would be necessary to add a special spatial sensitivity derived from his training as an architect. Few artists represent like him that primitive way of looking that artists have before the daily realities that surround us. Pérez Villalta has kept intact that joyous capacity for wonder at what surrounds us, which makes him an ideal artist to illustrate a story as polyhedral as Swift's work.

This exhibition project was born from artistic action online “On this day in history”, a personal project by the artist Diana Larrea (Madrid, 1972) that consisted of periodically publishing the biographies and works of historical female artists on social media. This action revalued and vindicated the work of hundreds of women that has been ignored or relegated to a marginal position within the history of art. It is a historical review focused on the recovery of the artistic work of women that has been dismissed and minimized by the hegemonic androcentric discourse.

From this action, Diana Larrea managed to accumulate an archive of 450 visual artists at that time and which is collected on the web www.taldiacomohoy.es for consultation of any interested party.

As if a new artistic movement had been born, the exhibition “Magical Feminism” reflected the discovery of this collective feminine artistic imaginary that had been hidden from us until now and has only recently been revealed. Larrea invited current artists of her own generation to show works inspired by these new female referents. The artists Paula Noya, María Gimeno, María María Acha-Kustcher, Mª Carmen García ^Klamca^, Marina Vargas, Aurora Duque and Diana Larrea herself, presented a series of works of painting, photography, drawing, collage, sculptural objects and video. The common purpose was to manifest a special link and connection with the female creators of the past, to make visible their relevance within the history of art and so that they could be appreciated by the public as key and essential artistic figures on the same level as their male counterparts.

Curator: Diana Larrea

Gregorio Prieto (Valdepeñas 1897–1992) never held a camera in his hands, but he used it through his friends to create a kind of imagined biography, having himself photographed in a variety of poses and scenes full of narcissism and sometimes disturbing, revealing his deep admiration for Greco-Latin art.

Frequenting the company of the great poets of the Generation of '27, the young Gregorio Prieto trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando before continuing his studies in Paris and, later, as a landscape painting pensioner, at the Academy of Spain in Rome during the period 1928–1933. It was in the Italian capital where his passion for photography blossomed as a result of his friendship with fellow painting scholar Eduardo Chicharro Briones, a photographer amateur who supported him in the technical part and with whom he conceived the avant-garde snapshots that make up the first of his photographic stages.

When the war broke out in Spain in the summer of 1936, Gregorio Prieto sought refuge in London where he took up residence; He could not imagine then that he would begin an exile that would last more than eleven years, until the end of 1947. During these years in England he met the Spanish-English sculptor Fabio Barraclough, with whom he would resume his photographic activity there, and especially upon his return to Spain, from the fifties.

Both in the photographs taken in Rome and in later ones from the XNUMXs, it is Gregorio Prieto who composes all these scenes full of great modernity.

Curator: Almudena Cruz Yabar

Our current society has been defined as the society of the image. An iconic use that transcended from the mass media to the plastic arts in the middle of the XNUMXth century, and which has been on the rise to this day, where the users themselves are the diffusers of the photographic image.

Photography owes its official birth to the lithographer Nicéphore Niépce in 1824, with the invention of heliography (from Helium- sun and –graph, writing/image): so the first relationship between photography and the printing arts was already in the very birth of the achievement of the physical embodiment of the image captured through the use of lenses.

This exhibition explored this evolution of the use of the photographic image in graphics, since it is precisely the arts of printing that have been most favourable to the transfer of photography to the artistic object. Its use, not only in the conceptual field, but also in the aesthetic field, has always been eclectic; but we could establish a common pattern in the intentionality of artists in the use of transferred images: the principle of recognition in order to favour the direct identification of the spectator with the work.

"Transferred Images" was composed of 60 works from the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Spanish Engraving (Marbella) made by 45 authors: The authors declare that they are all legally binding on the Spanish language.

Commissar: German Borrachero

Like it is a symptom. An alteration in the ecosystem of visual production that reveals the existence of a deranged behavior, more concerned with pointing out our being in the world than with showing the world. Installed in the capitalism of images -in its excess, access and suffocation- of the post-photographic era, the following question arises: is it possible to experience the emotion of discovery?

Faced with the overload of multiple stimuli and reactions, the author pursues the old desire of modernity to explore a virgin landscape that has not been colonized by the gaze. Stop seeing a crowded stage. Are there no places left to run? Can one aspire to contemplative solitude? Emptiness is a motivation that lasts in the imagination and pushes the photographer to undertake each trip. Even if it is a lunatic journey, a fiction or an impossibility.

Like it is an impression of our time, that global village we inhabit where the human figure appears merged with the background, like a faded being. A sign suspended on the surface without order, or concert, or identity. Hence the author's drive to move to a new uninhabited territory. Perhaps further than ever, perhaps outside of this reality.

Curator: Mireia A. Puigventos

The 20s have always been surrounded by an almost mythological halo.

The turbulent times in Europe after the First World War favoured a creative boom and at the same time an unprecedented economic crisis. Spain, and Madrid in particular, was not left out. The first newspaper at that time was ABC with an average circulation of 160.000 copies. The enormous popularity enjoyed by the newspaper was mainly due to the quality and variety of its photographs, being a pioneer in this field.

This exhibition aimed to show what those times were like in Madrid, through a tour of different aspects of the political, civil, military, religious, cultural and social life of Madrid at that time, both in the capital and in the province. This project brought to light previously unpublished and recovered material thanks to the creation of a digital master of the original archives.

Commissar: Matthias Grandson

The exhibition "Jesús Madriñán. A Thousand Nights and One Night" presented three photographic series taken between 2011 and 2016 that explored the construction of contemporary youth identity.

Madriñán photographed unknown young people in a relaxed and social environment, the result of his nocturnal forays with a large-format analogue camera. "Good Night London", the initial project, portrayed an urban and cosmopolitan London that contrasted with the rural and emotionally closer nature of Galicia in "Boas Noites". The Italian experiences of "Dopo Roma" represented a further step in Madriñán's technical, cultural and generational exploration.

This temporary exhibition was inspired by the structure of linked stories in "The Thousand and One Nights" to propose a narrative thread between the three series, connecting the youth of London, Galicia and Rome and concluding with the arrival of dawn. As if it were three volumes of the same work, each photograph could be understood as an autonomous chapter, linked to all the others in terms of finish and theme.

With a total of 36 works – of which ten were produced specifically for this project – the exhibition encouraged dialogue between the series for the first time and created a dim atmosphere that emulated the darkness of the nightclubs where the photographs were taken, inviting the viewer to feel like they were on the dance floor.

Curator:  Montserrat Pis Marcos

How to define the relationship between natural and artificial? His dichotomy is the starting point for this show.

We inhabit a time that geologists define as the Anthropocene, as it reflects the impact of man on earth. An era in which our species - the Homo Sapiens- has been and is capable of manipulating and putting a large part of the animal and plant world at its service, seeking its maximum performance and productivity, but also causing a radical transformation of terrestrial ecosystems, today very deteriorated given the speed with which they have suffered these changes.

In this context of domesticated nature, it is worth asking: Where is the wild? In line with this question, we could well ask ourselves whether the term “natural” itself, understood as a spontaneous product of nature, needs redefinition. The speed of artificial processes means that today we value the natural positively as something organic and autonomous, and that we think of the “artificial” as a subcategory of nature, because it lacks its own force, is inert and soulless. We also understand the artificial as something that is beginning to escape the domain and control of human beings, such as genetic manipulation in medicine or artificial intelligence, today as necessary as they are questioned.

"Natural artificial" explored our relationship with nature through the eyes of several artists. To do so, works were brought together in which an intervened, ordered and classified nature could be observed, revealing the relationship between human beings and their environment. Bodies that challenged cultural clichés and connected with a spirituality that is articulated from the supernatural or from the unconscious that seeks the origin and that opens a door that takes us into the realm of fiction. In short, the artists gathered explored different perspectives to make visible and question our relationship with nature through ecology, the body and myth.

Curator: violet janeiro