Madrid, Spain

El Ranchito

Nave 16, Matadero Madrid

The Public Presentation of El Ranchito (a project initiated by Matadero-Madrid) could have been an exhibition of produced works. However, if we understood “result” in a broader sense and we would evaluate El Ranchito as a research project we would realize that at the exhibition described before there would be creators, tools, places, temporalities, and many other agents that define the project missing.

In order to give visibility to all these agents and to integrate them in the presentation the emphasis has been shifted from the exhibition to the archive, to reveal simultaneously in one space different phases, times and formats of the project. For that purpose all the participants and projects at different stages of development have been included, as well as all the tools that the working group of El Ranchito have been putting together to intensify the local network of creators: studio spaces, residencies, co-working area, leisure zones and socializing areas that have remained active during the four months of the Public Presentation.

As there is not a single narrative that articulates El Ranchito but every project has emerged aligned to some of the shared working concepts stated at the beginning of the project by a series of round tables, some narratives have been constructed “a posteriori” through lines on the floor that, as in archeological reconstructions, organize, distribute and orient through shared concepts through the space. In front of this amalgamated space a pasarell-observing deck permits to see the whole space at once, and at the same time proposes different points of view and ways of seeing. Built with pallets it holds as well the archive, the library or the documentation space, proposing in its in-betweens socializing spaces as an amphitheater or a bar, while adapting to the structure of the warehouse.

All these strategies have been materialized through prefabricated and reusable materials: recycled pallets, plastic curtains and adhesive tape, in the search on a resources economy. In this way the space of the Nave 16 of Matadero is constituted in a complexity in which the absence of hierarchies generates overlap, friction, coupling and collaboration. For its intermediate scale it can remind a small urban area or an amplified domestic space, which perform as a tridimensional expanded archive.

Working Group of El Ranchito: Pablo Berastegui, Gema Melgar, Manuela, Nerea Calvillo, Luisa Fuentes , Iván López Munuera, Catarina Saraiva.

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El Ranchito

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