#Unmetroymedio

Exhibition Curators: Manuel Segade and Tania Pardo Pérez

In these strange times of utter uncertainty, we are living in a world where the future is no longer going to be what we had imagined it would be. If the mission of contemporary art museums is to work with the future of art, to anticipate art forms to come, then it must also be our duty to start putting in place new ways of understanding what our work entails, to promote new relationships of mutual support and to invent other kinds of institutional care.

CA2M is now implementing the #Unmetroymedio project, which consists in getting artists who are resident in the Region of Madrid to explain to us what they are working on during confinement. Availing of the domestic means at hand, they will express their ideas through texts and images or will simply tell us how they are and talk about the possible futures that face us. The one and a half metres referenced in the title of the project refers to the recommended distance between people during this period of lockdown, a rule that forces us to invent new forms of emotional closeness, whether it be through windows, balconies or screens.

All this material, posted every three days on our social media, will be accompanied by a small, simple and paused archive which, at once, will serve as a register of the need to communicate through screens, domestic spaces turned into improvised workplaces, of forms of production from a state of emergency, of digital affective networks and collective ways of confronting fear. Each contribution will add to the museum’s documentary holdings and help record the historical, political and social moment we are living through. #Unmetroymedio is necessarily an open project in the making, constantly reconfigured in function of the uncertainty of the passing days and of the longed-for moment of reconstruction.

From CA2M’s experience as a public institution that, now more than ever, must accommodate and defend its function as a tool for thought and diffusion, #Unmetroymedio announces a firm commitment to continue providing its full support to the most fragile and yet unquestionably most important segment of the art world: the artists themselves. To this end, we also believe it is essential to underscore that our proposal is not based on altruism and gratuity, but is instead a call for ethical responsibility and the protection of our very medium: the importance of remunerating work.

PARTICIPANTS

Irma Álvarez-Laviada

Andrés Senra

Ángela Cuadra

Raisa Maudit

Antonio Fernández Alvira

Carlos Aires

Jimena Kato

Diego del Pozo

Javier Rodríguez Lozano

Marian Garrido

Pablo Durango

Ana Esteve Reig

María Sánchez

Mario Espliego

Jorge Mirón

Gabriela Bettini

Julián Cruz

Nacho Martín Silva

Esther Gatón

Blanca Gracia

House of Tupamaras

Momu & No Es

Clara Montoya

Luis Úrculo

Fernando García Dory

* The list of participants will be added to as contributions are posted.

The image is a view of the exhibition Allan Kaprow. Comfort Zones. June 1975 (CA2M, 2018), which revisited the actions conceived by Allan Kaprow at Galería Vandrés in Madrid several months before the end of Franco’s regime. The happening consisted in protocols for couples, at a time when demonstrations of intimacy in the public space were checked by the authoritarian regime then in place. Photo: Andrés Arranz.