A Special Scenario in Perpetual Metamorphosis. Gaviota Gallery, Madrid

A Special Stage in Perpetual Metamorphosis is the inaugural exhibition of Gaviota, a new cultural space located in a former textile warehouse in Carabanchel. Gaviota joins the ecosystem of institutions dedicated to art production and exhibition that, taking advantage of the effects of deindustrialization and its subsequent socio-spatial restructuring, proliferated in the south of Madrid in the last decade.

The construction of urban and institutional space through material, conceptual and linguistic processes is one of the recurring themes in the work of artists Christian Lagata, Karlos Martínez and Beatriz Olabarrieta. Collecting debris from the logics of capitalist consumption, the mechanisms of modern control and identity debates characterizing the neoliberal city and its artistic institutions, they resort to fracture, desire, discomfort and curiosity as germs of alternative civic practices. For example, the rebellious attitude of Lagata’s cold metallic feather boas that, reclining on the architecture of the walls or floor, erotically resist being awakened from their unproductive state. Or the libidinal violence of Martínez's scarred bodies, which both refer to the displacement of certain communities from the center of civic life as well as the poetic and spatial opportunities arising in these margins. Or the desynchronization between body and language, between flesh and space, between technology and subjectivity serve Olabarrieta to identify new relationships between institution and spectator far beyond the utopian alignment of subject and discourse.

Karlos Martínez B., Black Patterns (Columns), 2021; Christian Lagata, Gran Serpiente Pequeña Serpiente II-III, 2021. Photo: Christian Lagata

Ultimately, the artists in the exhibition point to the impossibility of isolating the spatial and material codes of art from the urban and civic processes triggered by the global economy. An intersection underlining the opening of Gaviota. On this occasion the conceptual sculpture of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark comes to the fore amongst the constellation of genealogies that these artists reclaim. As Matta-Clark pointed out before, and as Olabarrieta, Martínez and Lagata’s work suggests now, the turn of neoliberalism’s urbanism and its institutions forces us to rethink the art object as “a special stage in perpetual metamorphosis, a model for peoples’ constant action on space as much as in the space that surrounds them.”