One of the design works that most impact and that usually falls into oblivion is the advertising posters. Metres and metres of billboards, bulletin boards, canopies, banderoles... covered with numerous layers of glued paper. Although the nostalgic people always want to keep the concert that made history or the movie that marked his childhood.

A group of entrepreneurs Bilbao has launched an app that develops a cultural agenda based on the posters designed to announce each of the activities: Postwall. This initiative has already exceeded 5,000 downloads in its five months of life. With these figures, it is evident that the communicative power of the poster resides in its visual impact and that the public is still sensitive to the quality of good design, something increasingly demanding and complicated in an environment of permanent competition in digital communication.

Beyond the fetishists and collectors who paper the walls of their rooms with posters of their small vital "milestones" (where there is no movie poster - especially Star Wars or similar - or a musical star - from Michael Jackson to Beyoncée-?), it is good to keep in mind that behind all good posters there are many hours of work. It is about harmonizing the information with an image that impacts, and a lot of design work in which the main artistic trends of the moment concentrate.

In fact, a poster can be used for much more than to announce an activity. It can create a tendency, influence the style of an era, become a reference of art for posterity. This has happened with communist aesthetics during the Cold War, with a propaganda poster that today is updated in the hands of authors such as Shepard Fairey, apart from other paradigmatic examples such as Mucha and his compositions Art Deco (sometimes it is difficult to know what was before , the poster or the style itself), or the total fusion of trends by Víctor Moscoso, a Galician poster designer based in California who set a trend in the 60s to generate an unmistakable style.

As Patrick San Juan, one of the founders of Postwall, explains, a good poster anticipates the experience of the event it announces. However, the graphic designer, the true alma mater of these works, goes completely unnoticed and remains forgotten to the value chain associated with the event at stake. This idea, added to the need to collect in one place all the cultural offer of the city, motivated the creation of this app that so far, without reaching the half year of life, already works in all Basque Country, Barcelona and Madrid and continues to expand to Seville and Valencia.

ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. CICLO DE PERFORMANCE X ART MADRID'26

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.

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.

PERFORMANCE: OSCURECER UN PAPEL. BY ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

March 5 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

Nocturnality. Installation. Rocío Valdivieso..

Oscurecer un papel forms part of a series of actions in which the artist engages in reading through repetition, memorization, and a measured degree of improvisation. Within this framework, a non-linear mode of reading emerges from a written text that is transformed when spoken aloud, assuming a different form in the act of articulation. The texts stem from an ongoing investigation into materiality, space, the relationships between body and matter, writing, the sculptural, and a sustained interest in the exploration of voice and orality.

The material from which Oscurecer un papel is constructed consists of a collection of purchase receipts the artist has been accumulating over time. The printed text they contain, together with the action of bringing them into proximity with a heat source—thereby activating the thermal paper on which they are produced—generates meanings that revolve around the notions of consumption and wear.

Rocío Valdivieso. Latent Aura. Performance documentation.

ABOUT ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

Rocío Valdivieso is an artist, researcher, and cultural manager. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds an MA in Research in Artistic Practices from the University of Castilla–La Mancha (UCLM) and a BA in Fine Arts from the National University of Tucumán, Argentina. She was a Fundación Carolina fellow from 2022 to 2023. She currently co-directs Errática. Laboratory of Processes and Critique in Madrid, alongside Romina Casile.

She was part of the PEEPA 2023 Program at the Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid. She completed the 2021/22 Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, and in 2020 participated in the Intensive Curatorial Program of Proyecto PAC at Galería Gachi Prieto, Buenos Aires. She received the Visual Arts Promotion Award at the 4th Visual Arts Week of the Ente Cultural de Tucumán. She was awarded an AUGM scholarship for an exchange residency at UNESP, São Paulo, Brazil. She also participated in the International Residency Program La Ira de Dios and in the Acéfala Galería Residency for Argentine artists.