The Experience of Including Ephemeral Art in Madrid through Regulated Institutions. Madrid Abierto, 2004-2011

Abstract

The city of Madrid has experienced in the last seve n years small temporary transformations through the inclusion of urban artistic perfo rmances in parallel to contemporary art fair ARCO. As a result of the art fair ARCO ari ses an interesting initiative consisting in moving to the street those more current art refl ections. Starting its location in a physical context directly linked to the fair it was moving, in principle, from representative streets of the city of Madrid towards less cen trally located neighborhoods. Willing to do more accessible art for citizens as well as t he search for the city-art interaction was triggering the emergence of projects increasingly i nvolved with the physical and social space of Madrid over the years. The trend of the ev olution of the approach to the artistic projects was clearly directed towards the inter mediation of the artist as a catalyst of the relationship of the citizen with his city. The interventions moved from being purely artistic to serve as a place of encounter and refle ction on specific urban situations, posing in a clearer way the participation of the neigh bor in the projects through the study, in some cases, actual needs in certain neighborhood s. The interest of the evolution of the projects lies in possible continuity of actions , raised, in principle, such as mayflies, trying to work with the social space simultaneously to the physical space of the chosen places. The valuation of the real effect of the int erventions of the past few years presents us the hypothesis of the possibility of art a s a transformer of the public space, understood as a place of encounter and collective thi nking.