The corpse of a woman is lying on the pavement of some pedestrian street in Seville. Many people remain paralyzed with fear in front of the body, others go on their way avoiding to look at the throbbing horror that remains on the pavement. The same body, now surrounded by mannequins, is part of a lingerie shop window. And those who stop in front of the glass of the shop barely distinguish between the texture of skin and that of the plastic, between the color of a living body and that of inert matter.

These lines that seem to describe our reality, are part of the radical bet of Seville-born artist Pilar Albarracín, who through her performances, sculptures, paintings, photographs, fabrics and installations, she masterfully evokes the violence against women, and embodies perfectly the fight against the gender and flamenco representations, often contaminated with clichés and prejudices begotten and consolidated during Franco´s regimen, and which now continue defining the cultural hegemony in which we are both victims and executioners.

A point. Serie Carne y tiempo, (2018)

Abuse against women, overuse of her body and progressive trivialization, as well as the overall package of clichés and tags that represents female identity in a equivocal manner, these compose the main lines of Pilar Albarracín’s work, an artist that understands art like an enunciation place in which social participation and criticism are possible; Albarracín illustrates it “con maña y desparpajo” (a local expression that means achieving something with great audacity and self-confidence) in each of her public-space performances, those in which the artist challenges the spectator through an unexpected factor disturbing and making the subject uncomfortable, taking him to the purest Catharsis, the same state that captures the author herself during the creative process.

A sort of Catharsis that reminds us of the Greek tragedies and the release experimented by Ancient Greece’s audience when they attended the performance of their own conflicts embodied in another body. There is tragedy in the dead female corpses that compose S/T (Sangre en la calle) series (1992); there is also tragedy in the display windows that exhibit disguised women wearing silk and microfiber clothes along with plastic dolls whose slender bodies are really near toxic, works from the Escaparates (1993-1995) series. There was, and continues to be, tragedy in a woman’s body.

Lunares (2000), Pilar Albarracín

However, the Sevillian artist’s work not only transpires tragic irony but also excess, lack of control, satire, mockery and madness –so characteristic of Dionysius, father of comedy– also play a leading role in her projects articulating an artistic imaginary replete with parodies and tragicomedies in which references to excess, pain, blood, bulls, wine, comedy, flamenco, female body and red color abound, the same red color that stains every scene and that which symbolizes the believe as such lo español (essentially “Spanish”), whose meaning we are still perverting.

Asnería (2010), Pilar Albarracín

In the video-performance Lunares (2001) we can watch Albarracín dressed in white flamenco clothing that she gradually colors by stabbing with a pin various parts of her body creating red polka-dots; or Prohibido el Cante (2000), in which the artist is wearing a Sevillian dress and she is singing her lamentations, songs that grow in crescendo until they become orgasmic wailings, until she ruins her dress and tears her heart out throwing it to the “tablao flamenco” (flamenco stage). Thus, Albarracín’s universe, which so well defines our present, strongly connects with the sacrifice tradition, very characteristic of the stark Baroque era, also passing through the critique of Spanish tradition developed by Goya, and just as through kitch poetics.

Flamencas (2009), Pilar Albarracín

The exhibition Pilar Albarracín. Que me quiten lo bailao will be on view until January 27, 2019, in Tabacalera - Promoción del Arte.

Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

In this sense, the invited artists will construct micro-scenarios in which gestures, postures, and bodily movements function as performative “fronts,” shaping the framework of perception and meaning for the audience. These actions dramatize everyday experience, offering idealized or heightened interpretations of the relationship between body, space, and temporality, while certain elements — invisible effort, internal tensions, contradictions — remain partially concealed, generating deeper layers of meaning and resonance.

In line with Goffman, performance operates within the tension between idealized representation and real effort, between what is visible and what remains silent. The artists manage the information they convey, selecting what is shown and what is concealed, articulating strategies of presence that may reveal or disguise power, vulnerability, resistance, or intimacy. In this context, idealization implies the construction of a performative language capable of foregrounding values, tensions, and relational possibilities, exposing the poetic density of the everyday and, if one wishes, breaking the barrier of opacity that shapes our behavior in “real” daily life.

Although the series focuses on the notions of body ↔ memory ↔ representation ↔ presence, it seeks to expand its horizon, conceiving performance as an act that reveals invisible bonds and tensions traversing bodies, objects, and contexts. Within this network of walls, stands, and corridors, parallels emerge as the Galería de Cristal becomes a mirror of aesthetic experiences: a space beyond the strictly artistic sphere temporarily inhabited by the ephemeral presence of contemporary art, as occurs within the context of the fair.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.

INVITED ARTISTS

COLECTIVO LA BURRA NEGRA (Málaga, 2024)

La Burra Negra is a nomadic Action Art collective based in Málaga, founded in 2024 following its first residency in Totalán. It is self-managed by Ascensión Soto Fernández, Gabriela Feldman de la Rocha, Sasha Camila Falcke, Sara Gema Domínguez Castillo, Sofía Barco Sánchez, and Regina Lagos González, six creators from diverse backgrounds who met at the Hospital de Artistas of La Juan Gallery.

The collective brings together professionals from jewelry, painting, performing arts, music, dance, cultural mediation, and cultural management. Its activities include an annual residency in Totalán, the production of performative works, cultural mediation, and site-specific interventions. Since its creation, it has participated in the Periscopio Conference at La Térmica, presented A granel at the MVA in Málaga, carried out various actions in Totalán — most recently during its second annual residency — and taken part with its own proposals in Roger Bernat’s performance Desplazamiento del Congreso de los Diputados in Madrid.

Colectivo La Burra Negra presents at Art Madrid’26 its performance: ALTA FACTURA

The project forms part of a performative investigation that questions exhibition frameworks and the hierarchies of value that shape artistic creation. Through textile language and the body as a surface of inscription, the collective examines the tension between process and result, craft and spectacle, focusing on what the cultural system tends to conceal: invested time, wear, fragility, and the manual labor that sustains every work. Within this framework, the fashion runway appears as a symbolic structure condensing brilliance, consumption, and final product, becoming the point of departure for its subversion.

In this context, Alta Factura shifts attention to the seams — both literal and metaphorical — that usually remain in the shadows backstage. Through conceptual textile pieces, the performance exposes the rigor of craft and the artist’s vulnerability, transforming the runway into a critical space where process becomes the protagonist. By making visible the joints, adjustments, and traces of making, the work reclaims the value of the invisible and confronts the viewer with the material and affective conditions that sustain contemporary artistic practice.

ROCÍO VALDIVIESO (Tucumán, Argentina, 1994)

Rocío Valdivieso is an artist, researcher, and cultural manager. She is currently a PhD candidate in Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid and holds a Master’s degree in Research in Artistic Practices from the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM). She earned a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the National University of Tucumán and was a Fundación Carolina fellow between 2022 and 2023.

She currently coordinates Errática Laboratorio de procesos and Clínica de obra, alongside Romina Casile, in Madrid. She was part of the PEEPA 2023 Program at Matadero Madrid’s Center for Artistic Residencies, mentored by Dora García, Cabello/Carceller, and Isabel Marcos. She completed the 2021/22 Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires.

Among her solo exhibitions are El orden de las virtudes (2022), Pintura plegaria (2021), and Teoría de lo involuntario (2019) in Tucumán, Argentina. She has participated in group exhibitions including Aura latente at Espacio Amazonas, the closing event of the PEEPA Program at Matadero Madrid, and Ceder una huella in Cuenca, Spain. Since 2013, she has participated in various educational programs and frequently writes texts accompanying art exhibitions. She is a founding member and former secretary of the board of the Association of Visual Arts Workers of Tucumán (TAViT).

Rocío Valdivieso presents at Art Madrid’26 her performance: OSCURECER UN PAPEL

Oscurecer un papel is part of a series of actions in which reading is constructed through repetition, memorization, and a degree of improvisation. A non-linear reading emerges from a written text that transforms when spoken aloud, shifting its form and meaning in the very act of utterance. The texts stem from research into materiality, space, and the relationships between body and matter, as well as writing, sculpture, and the exploration of voice and orality.

The material used to construct the piece consists of purchase receipts accumulated over time. The printed text on them, together with the act of bringing them close to a heat source — triggering the reaction of thermal paper — generates meanings linked to consumption, record-keeping, and wear.

AMANDA GATTI (Porto Alegre, Brasil, 1996)

Amanda Gatti is an artist and researcher whose practice unfolds across performance, video, photography, and installation. She explores the intersections between body, object, and space, investigating how we occupy — and are occupied by — the spaces that surround us. Drawing from experiences of displacement and observations of domestic and urban environments, her work conceives the body as mediator and archive, transforming found objects, spatial arrangements, and everyday gestures into ephemeral architectures and relational situations.

She completed a Master’s in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture at Museo Reina Sofía/UCLM (Spain, 2023) and holds a degree in Audiovisual Production from PUCRS (Brazil, 2018). Her work has been presented at institutions and contexts such as Museo Reina Sofía, Fundación Antonio Pérez, Galería Nueva, CRUCE, and Teatro Pradillo, as well as in exhibitions and festivals in Brazil, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She currently resides in Madrid, with secondary bases in Brazil and the United Kingdom.

Amanda Gatti presents at Art Madrid’26 her performance: TRAYECTORIA

This performance continues the artist’s long-term research with objects found in public space: obsolete fragments, remnants of everyday use, and discarded materials that, once painted blue, acquire renewed visibility and an autonomous sculptural condition. These materials form an archive activated through gesture and displacement.

In Trayectoria, the artist proposes to traverse the fair’s main corridor while dragging a large group of these objects, linked together and tied to her shoelaces. The journey transforms this transit area into an active space in which body and materials generate new forms. The objects function as extensions of the moving body: they tense, divert, slow down, and reconfigure each step. The action explores the coexistence between the durable and the ephemeral, between what has been discarded and what insists on remaining. It approaches transit as the simultaneous activation of the material and immaterial, proposing an encounter between gesture, the sculptural, and all that continues to accompany us even after having been left behind.

JIMENA TERCERO (Madrid, 1998)

Jimena Tercero is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice — developed through video, performance, and painting — investigates the limits of identity in relation to the human body. Her work explores concepts such as memory, tangibility, and play, delving into subconscious pain inscribed in bodily memory.

She trained in painting with Lola Albín and in analog photography in Cambridge (2014). Between 2018 and 2020, she specialized in audiovisual practice, training as a filmmaker alongside figures such as director Víctor Erice and the production company El Deseo. She later completed a Master’s in Creative Direction at ELISAVA and developed her performative practice at La Juan Gallery.

She directed works such as Private (2016) and Paranoid (2021), presented at Galería Aspa Contemporary. She continued this line of inquiry in Yo mi me conmigo (2023), presented at Teatros del Canal; Inside Voices (2021), filmed at Conde Duque with the guidance of Itziar Okariz; and La última regla at La Juan Gallery. In 2026, she premieres the documentary Contando Ovejas, a portrait of two shepherds in Majadahonda reflecting on rural memory and its relationship with territory and time.

Jimena Tercero presents at Art Madrid’26 her performance: OFF LINE

OFF LINE is a performative piece that reflects on how the digital era is transforming the body’s relationship with the world and with others. Interaction is increasingly constructed through screens and interfaces, and identity shifts toward the virtual, subordinating physical experience to digital representation. In this context, the body becomes fragile: it loses density, memory, and active presence, becoming a support for information or image.

Hyperconnectivity and fragmented attention generate an increasingly inert corporeality, characterized by reduced spontaneous movement and diminished direct sensory interaction. This raises fundamental questions: how is presence redefined when our relationship with the world depends on technological mediation? What will happen to bodily experience in a future in which virtuality predominates over the physical?

There is a risk of progressive bodily passivity: bodies that remain still, whose activity is determined by devices, and whose memory is externalized into digital records. The fragmentation of physical experience and the primacy of technological representation create a scenario in which the body, although visible, is displaced from its original function as an agent of perception and action. This conceptual framework invites reflection on how digitalization affects corporeality, memory, and social relations, as well as on the vulnerability and inertia that traverse bodies in increasingly technologized environments.

PERFORMANCES:

Wednesday, March 4 | 7:00 PM — Colectivo La Burra Negra. Performance: Alta Factura

Thursday, March 5 | 7:00 PM — Rocío Valdivieso. Performance: Oscurecer un papel

Friday, March 6 | 7:00 PM — Amanda Gatti. Performance: Trayectoria

Saturday, March 7 | 7:00 PM — Jimena Tercero. Performance: OFF LINE

Art Madrid celebrates its twenty-first edition, consolidating itself as a platform for visibility and dialogue for national and international galleries and artists during Madrid Art Week. In this context, the fair renews its commitment to experimentation and to the inclusion of artistic practices that challenge conventional art market formats. The integration of the Performance Cycle — now in its third edition — reflects this institutional commitment to generating a space that fosters the production of live artistic experiences.

The Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles, the fair’s venue, thus becomes an ideal environment in which architecture and the event’s own dynamics enhance the ephemeral and relational character of performance.

With this initiative, Art Madrid reaffirms its role as an active agent in the construction of a plural artistic ecosystem, committed to presence, research, and dialogue as fundamental axes of contemporary art.