Liquitex, market leader in acrylic paint, will once again participate in this new edition of Art Madrid as a collaborator through a very special project: #SomosKanva. Art and solidarity come together in a broad and admirable project led by (Kanva), International aid network through artistic creation; together with Shanga India, non-profit organization for schooling children from poor families in India; and Un Plato de Comida, a non-profit organization whose purpose is to provide the necessary meals at the "María Soliña" School (India).

The three organizations, together with Liquitex and Art Madrid as collaborators, offer you the possibility of contributing to a project aiming to improve the vital needs and education of children living a poverty situation, marginality or abandonment in India. Although Liquitex has collaborated in the #Somoskanva project from the beginning, donating painting materials for (Kanva), in their visit to India, especially in actions at the Uma Sankar School "María Soliña", giving them the possibility to paint murals and organizing art workshops with children -this uplifting experience was recorded in a brief documentary. Now, Liquitex joins forces with Art Madrid in a new project in which we propose a charity challenge. If you are an artist and you want to help this immense and necessary workforce, we encourage you to support the project in the best way you can: through your art.

The first step of the challenge is selecting or creating a work for the project; in the second, (4th of February-10th of March), you would publish your work with the hashtags #Somoskanva and #Liquitex, this way sharing the project with your followers. This work of art will be a part of the following exhibition (18th of March-18th of April) presented in Art Madrid's online art gallery, the Art Madrid market, where the work will be sold (under contract with the artist). Before, a team of specialists from Art of Madrid will carry out a selection process (11-17 March) of the participating works, choosing a total fifteen works that will form the online exhibition in the Art Madrid market. All 100% of the proceeds from the sale will be given to the NGO Un Plato de comida. In addition, Liquitex will select one of these fifteen works and will reward its author with 500 euros in supplies.

Liquitex, that has been innovating in the acrylic paint industry since 1955, for instance, inventing the first water-based acrylic paint, currently offers a range of intense and vibrant acrylic paints in all formats (thick and thin bodied paint, inks, markers and sprays), acrylic medium and various accessories. In addition, their products have the particularity that they can be mixed perfectly so that the palette of any artist will not encounter any experimentation limits. Thus, Liquitex offers infinite possibilities of expression in one of the cornerstones of creation, colour, something that has undoubtedly made the brand a great reference for contemporary creators.

Artists often as committed as the creators of (Kanva): Desi Civera, Nicolás Chiaravalloti and Rodrigo Molinero, who since 2018 have been working in this social and artistic action bringing the most disadvantaged children closer to art. An aspiration that they share with the organization Un Plato de Comida, founded by Antonio Valiente in 2011 to provide the children of rural Orissa the meals they need at the Uma Sankar School "María Soliña" (Pubai, Orissa, India) a school that offers free basic education and also takes in homeless children non-profit. Likewise, the organization founded by María (Neneta) Herrero, Shanga India, which their main goal since 2004 is educating children from humble families.

National and international artists such as Carla Fuentes, Thomas Cian, Anwei and Julio Linares, have united with this cause, creating and donating works that were later presented in a charity exhibition that raised 6,000 euros, entirely allocated to these NGOs. What about you, do you want to be a part of #SomosKanva?

Thirteen years have passed since its beginnings, and in all this time the Video Art Festival PROYECTOR has grown and consolidated its position as an essential event in this discipline. Since its inception, the initiative has tried to give visibility to a discipline that has always been relegated to the background in the usual exhibition circuits. Although video creation is not new, since it emerged by its own in the 60s of last century, the way to get to know it and enjoy it has not always been easy. On many occasions, the exhibitions only included a few isolated pieces within the main route, as if the video was the anecdotal contribution to the whole. However, our daily lives are invaded by moving images, and there is a paradox that video art, despite being a format of artistic expression very much in tune with the habits of today's society, remains a minority discipline

Frame from “Hel City”, by Gregorio Méndez Sáez, 2019

To some extent, PROYECTOR was born to reverse this situation, to value video as a creative format and to offer a wide, itinerant space to host a multitude of proposals, coming from inside and outside our borders. In this time, the growth of the festival has led it to travel the world, but also, to be a benchmark that each year arouses more interest. In the open call to receive proposals, they reach almost half a thousand, and a hundred works selected by the jury are a representative sample of different ways of understanding video creation, with pieces mainly from Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

In turn, PROYECTOR wants to be more than a video showcase and offers a large program with talks, workshops, masterclasses, meetings with artists, visits and concerts. A complete experience that always has the moving image as a backdrop.

El Instante Francisco Ruiz de Infante. El bosque que se mueve (errores de medida)

In this evolution, another circumstance stands out: video is a creative format that has its own codes, but it is also one of the disciplines most open to artistic hybridization and the widening of uses. The video may, therefore, be the genuine idea of an author who conceives an autonomous project to be carried out in this format, but it can also be the complementary result of an action or the documentary record of a previous performance being recorded to guarantee its survival. The versatility of the moving image and the potential that it has acquired in recent years allows us today to speak of numerous branches of art that focus on the fusion of languages and the integration of techniques and methodologies from other sectors, and in many of them, the video is still a cornerstone. So it is with technological art, interactive sound art, performance recording, the transformation from big data to image, artificial intelligence, and a long etcetera. Precisely for this reason, PROYECTOR offers a panoramic vision of this reality, with an extremely interesting program that plays with the variety and wealth of proposals.

Frame from “Herdança”, by Thiago Rocha Pitta, 2007

The 2020 edition will run from September 9th to 20th. As usual, the program displays in various venues throughout the city of Madrid, each of which will house a small section of the activities. This year the festival will count with the collaboration of the Casa Árabe, White Lab, Cruce, El Instante Fundación, ¡ésta es una PLAZA!, Extensión AVAM (Matadero Madrid), Institut Français de Madrid, Medialab Prado, Quinta del Sordo, Sala Alcalá 31, Sala El Águila, Secuencia de Inútiles and White Lab, in addition to the collaboration of the INELCOM Collection and the video art collection of Teresa Sapey.

The festival is also the ideal place to articulate the cultural fabric, since it involves numerous professionals in the sector, from curators to creators, from centres managers to critics and teachers. The 2020 program also has the collaboration of the FUSO Festival and the Museo Reina Sofía, which are providing some of their pieces for the exhibition.

In short, an appointment that lovers of contemporary art should not miss and that promises many novelties in this 13th edition.