RAÍCES AFUERA. PERFORMANCE CYCLE X ART MADRID'25

Art Madrid celebrates twenty years of contemporary art from March 5 to 9, 2025, at the Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles. During Art Week, it becomes an exhibition platform for national and international galleries and artists. In this edition, with the aim of providing a space for artists working in the realm of performance art, the fair presents Raíces Afuera, a performance cycle that explores notions of belonging and the need for rootedness in a contemporary world marked by fragmentation, displacement, and disconnection. Positioned within the fair as a critical and reflective space, the project challenges the individual’s relationship with their environment, community, and sense of identity.

PERFORMANCE: EL PESO DE LA CIUDAD LO LLEVO CONMIGO. BY AGUSTINA PALAZZO

March 9 | 17:00h. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

El peso de la ciudad lo llevo conmigo. Agustina Palazzo. Peformance documentacion. 2025.

The current urban landscape represents an environment saturated with symbols of modernity and technological “progress.” The television and radio antennas, which hover over rooftops, embody much more than their technical function. They emerge as markers of change, connecting generations to a global world, transforming urban life into a web of communication and entertainment.

This modification of the urban landscape has direct implications for the contemporary body, a body defined and altered through technology and its relationship with the environment. As Laura Barros Condés says in Habitar(se), “Technology has become an intrinsic part of individuals, largely through the body.”

Space itself is an organism that intervenes in the body. We experience an environment through the body, and inevitably, this relationship influences our way of connecting physically and psychologically, as well as the process of constructing identity. The body is defined and altered through its relationship with the environment.

The antennas, these inanimate objects that hover over the urban landscape, represent a powerful metaphor for an era saturated by technological mediation. Their abundant presence points to the paradox of connectivity that, while promising to unite us, fragments our attention and collective experience. As unnoticed monuments, they invite us to reflect on how technology redefines cities and our relationship with them.

El peso de la ciudad lo llevo conmigo seeks to make visible contemporary oppression—how industrialization, urbanization, and digitalization condition the construction of identity, stripping individuals of a vital connection and leaving an existential void in a body that inhabits the saturation of the urban landscape.

Radiorator II. Performance documentation. 2025. Agustina Palazzo.

ABOUT AGUSTINA PALAZZO

Agustina Palazzo (Córdoba, Argentina, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist from Córdoba, Argentina. Based in Barcelona, her practice spans art, education, and cultural management within the context of the digital world and new technologies. Her work oscillates between the critical and the poetic, using emerging themes and technologies as creative tools in performance, sound design, and installation. Her artistic research is nourished by the relationship between communication, human behavior, and new technologies, creating experiences that question the boundaries of human behavior and the digital realm. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions, festivals, and residencies across Latin America and Europe. Some of her notable engagements include IMMERSIVA at Espronceda, Institute of Art and Culture (ES), Tsonami Sound Art (CHILE), Rake Community, art and research platform (UK), SONAR + D (ES), LLUM (ES), Teorema (ES), 220 Contemporary Culture (AR), Millesuoni (IT), Espai 19 (ES), among others.

Agustina Palazzo's work focuses on human behavior, desires, and misunderstandings, exploring the contradictions of the contemporary crowd caught between technological refinement and moral erosion in fragmented attention spans. It swings between the critical and the poetic, inspired by science fiction, utopia, and dystopia, but with an emotional sensitivity anchored in the present. Her practice moves across performance, installation, video, sound, and archive, using technology not only as a tool but as a symbol of a social and political condition.

Taking advantage of its poetic dimension, she blends digital and analog techniques with everyday objects, stretching their meanings. Sound and radio are recurring elements in her quest, but her language is expansive, crossing through the visual, performative, and sonic. Experimentation, process, and critical reflection are the core of her practice, inviting the viewer to question their relationship with the digital and the real.

From July 7 to 9, 2025, the Balsera Palace will host the First Course on Collecting and Contemporary Art, an intensive 15-hour program that will explore the complex and fundamental question of taste in contemporary art. Organized by the Nebrija Institute of Arts and Humanities at Nebrija University and the Avilés City Council, in collaboration with 9915 — Association of Private Collectors of Contemporary Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art, the course offers a unique opportunity for analysis and debate on the dynamics that shape aesthetic and symbolic value in today’s art scene.

First Course on Collecting and Contemporary Art. Avilés, Asturias

The notion of taste, intrinsically tied to aesthetic judgments and power relations, has played a decisive role in the historical prominence of artists and artworks. However, contemporary art—marked by its breaking of conventions, diversity of media and techniques, and critical stance toward traditional canons—raises fundamental questions about the continued relevance of this concept.

This course will explore how the decisions made by key players in the art system—institutions, private collections, galleries, curators, and artists—continually redefine a field of taste shaped by aesthetic, symbolic, cultural, social, and political logics.

"¿But does it exist, and what is the prevailing taste of our time—so seemingly confused, fragmented, indecipherable?" - Omar Calabrese, The Neo-Baroque Era.

The academic program, directed by José Luis Guijarro Alonso, Director of the Master’s in Art Market and Related Business Management at Nebrija University, and Pablo Álvarez de Toledo, Head of the Department of Arts at Nebrija University and the Nebrija Institute of Arts and Humanities, will bring together a distinguished group of national experts—including collectors, critics, curators, gallery owners, and artists—whose contributions will address key issues in shaping aesthetic, symbolic, and market value in today’s art world.

PROGRAM

MONDAY, JULY 7

9:30 AM Registration.

10:00 AM Course Opening Nebrija University Avilés City Council Presented by Rosario López Meras – President of the Association of Contemporary Art Collectors, 9915, and Adrián Piera – President of the ICA, Institute of Contemporary Art.

10:30 AM Course Presentation By José Luis Guijarro Alonso – Art Historian and Anthropologist, Researcher, and Director of the Master’s in Art Market and Related Business Management at Nebrija University.

11:00 AM Coffee Break.

11:30 AM Panel Discussion The Taste of Private Collecting as a Prelude to History. Speakers: Candela Álvarez Soldevilla – Entrepreneur and Collector; Javier Quilis – INELCOM Collection; José Miguel Vegas Valle – Collector. Moderator: Luis Feás – Critic and Curator.

1:00 PM Lunch Break.

3:30 PM Individual Lecture On Good Taste in Contemporary Art. Speaker: Marisol Salanova – Curator and Art Critic, Director of Arteinformado.

4:45 PM Panel Discussion The Influence of Galleries in Shaping Contemporary Taste. Speakers: Elba Benítez – Gallerist; Ricardo Pernas – Gallerist (Arniches 26); Aurora Vigil-Escalera – Gallerist. Moderator: Rafael Martín – Coleccion@casamer.

6:00 PM End of Day.

6:30 PM Activity and Cocktail Visit to the Exhibition Asturian Artists in the Pérez Simón Collection – Avilés.

TUESDAY, JULY 8

10:00 AM Individual Lecture Contemporary (Bad) Taste: Kitsch, Camp, and Tacky. Speaker: Julio Pérez Manzanares – Autonomous University of Madrid.

11:00 AM Coffee Break.

11:30 AM Panel Discussion Institutions and the Formation of Contemporary Taste. Speakers: Virginia López – Artist, Founder of PACA_Proyectos Artísticos Casa Antonino; Julieta de Haro – Artistic Director of CentroCentro; Carlos Urroz – Director of Institutional Relations, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. Moderator: Laura Gutiérrez – Director, School of Art of Oviedo.

1:00 PM Lunch Break.

3:30 PM Panel Discussion Beyond the Eye: The Taste for Ethical, Ecological, Social, or Political Concerns in Contemporary Art. Speakers: Semíramis González – Independent Curator; Eugenio Ampudia – Artist; Claudia Rodríguez-Ponga – Independent Curator. Moderator: Bárbara Mur Borrás – PhD in Fine Arts.

5:00 PM End of Day.

5:30 PM Activity Visit to the Studiolo Exhibition – Candela Álvarez Soldevilla Collection.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 9

9:30 AM Meeting with Asturian Artists Speakers: María Castellanos – Artist; Avelino Sala – Artist; Consuelo Vallina – Artist. Moderator: Pablo Álvarez de Toledo – Nebrija University.

11:00 AM Activity Visit to the Niemeyer Center – Avilés.

Course Closing Ceremony.

This course is designed for art professionals, collectors, researchers, and students seeking an in-depth analysis of the dynamics that shape taste and collecting practices in contemporary art. Adopting a critical and multidisciplinary perspective, it provides a unique opportunity to rigorously examine the aesthetic, symbolic, and structural factors that underpin the legitimization of contemporary art.