Alejandro Monge. Courtesy of the artist.

ARTE & PALABRA. CONVERSATIONS WITH CARLOS DEL AMOR

It is difficult not to stop in front of the works of Alejandro Monge (Zaragoza, 1988), but beyond the initial legitimate curiosity, we discover characters about whom we ask ourselves questions: where they come from, where they are going, what they observe, what they listen to, what they think. There are few certainties and many questions to be answered, perhaps because for Monge the future is a place full of questions and therefore worries, and perhaps also, or perhaps not, because it is the only place where we are constantly moving. We may not know where we are going, but we are always moving towards tomorrow, and that tomorrow is the territory towards which his sculptures move. It is curious, we can say that his creations are very realistic and yet they have something that separates them from what we know and takes them to an alien terrain. They exist, but they are not part of this world, they seem to come from another and they seem to know more than we do about what awaits us. In some of his latest hypnotic works, we see only faces emerging from the bottom of a cement block, hard and fragile at the same time, and these creatures seem to be in an amniotic state, peaceful, oblivious to the future that will probably betray them as soon as they hatch.

SHIBUYA. Concrete, fiberglass, resine and pigments. 2023.

If you had to define yourself in one sentence, which one would you use?

I'm quite nonconformist, demanding in my work and I really like challenges. Technically I work a lot to try to surprise and create new things that surprise me. I try to talk about two main things: destruction as a new form of creation - something I have dedicated a lot of my artistic career to - and now I am very focused on my generation. It's something that interests me more and more every day. I want to represent the generation in which I live, to be a child of my time, and to one day see myself as a chronicler of my time. Maybe that is what motivates me the most today.

Where do the characters in your plays go, what is their future?

I develop them more and more every day. Especially in the last two years, I have created characters that represent my generation. That's why I want them to have classic icons of the era I lived through, combined with other elements that don't have to be current. I also want to give more context to my work and I think that is where the future is going. I'm going to try to make big, very big pieces, with installations that not only represent a character, but also what surrounds him. And although it's complex, because technically it requires a lot of work, a lot of sacrifice, technical means, materials... that's the way I'm going to go. Let's see how it goes.

BRKLN. Concrete, fiberglass, resine and pigments. 2023.

The future is an unknown place and I don't know if that's why, out of irresponsibility, we seem to worry little about it... Your work reflects a concern for that future, doesn't it?

Yes, actually my work is always about the future and the history we leave behind, it's a chronology in the end. Ever since I was a child I've always been interested in what's going to happen, and nowadays it's something I'm developing more and more. But I wouldn't say that I'm worried about the future, although it's true that I think there's a certain psychosis that the future is going to be terrible, catastrophic, and that everything is going to happen. But in reality my vision is a bit more optimistic, isn't it?

There is, it seems to me, a sense of legacy in the discipline of sculpture, of "leaving something on carved stone". Perhaps the first sculptures, not strictly speaking, were the footprints carved into the ground, the footprint. Is the footprint directly related to the future? Will we emerge well from the footprint we leave today?

I think that every generation has had its lights and shadows, and at every moment people have thought that it was the worst in history, that something terrible was coming, the seven plagues... But I think we are more prepared than ever for the future. Are we going to do well or badly? Well, some things we will do better or worse, but in my work I don't speak of a concern for the future, I speak of a concern, a curiosity. What does the future have in store for us? What will our society look like? What will our generations look like? So I think that what is beautiful in art, or what I try to deal with in my work, is more about asking myself: what mark do we leave in history, how will we be remembered in the future? That's something that interests me and that's the goal I'm most focused on right now, to be able to do my part and be a chronicler of my time, reflecting my generation.

THE BEGINNING. Concrete, fiberglass, resine and pigments. 2022.

Eyes open or eyes closed? Walking through your works, we can see that many of them have their eyes open, although I don't know if open means they can see, and others have their eyes closed.

I do both open-eye and closed-eye works, and although I was going to say that I like one more than the other, I don't think so, because they reflect different things. When a figure has its eyes closed, it is much more reflective, it is in a dreamlike world, it is more neutral, it conveys more calm and peace. In sculpture, representing open eyes is very complex because the eye is a crystalline lens, it's something that can't be represented sculpturally; like fire or smoke, which are not elements that you can sculpt or model. But I think this way of representing it, full eyes without pupils, is a more modern way of representing it than the way it was done in the past, when the eye was trepanned and a little dot was created in the pupil. I'm not interested in that anymore. I think it's something that makes the sculptures very hieratic, something fixed in time. But these eyes that I make, which are certainly more personal, are a bit disturbing, there are even people who don't like them because they give the feeling that they are piercing you with their gaze. But since I've talked a lot more about open eyes than closed ones, maybe I like them more.

LITTLE SHIBUYA. EDITION 1/7. Resine and pigments. 2023.

At a fair, the artist can see the reactions of the public, in your case, your work attracts a lot of attention, it is usually a meeting point. What do you feel when you see these reactions?

Well, fairs are something that I personally love. Ever since I went to Art Madrid for the first time years ago, I've always loved going to all the fairs. I like being there. If there's a fair, wherever it is in Spain or in the world, I go and I enjoy it a lot because it allows you to get to know. Both to get to know the gallery that represents you better and to get in touch with other artists, new artists you didn't know, artists you've been friends with for ten or twelve years, but above all it allows you to see how the public interacts with your work. That's something I'm very interested in, because an artist spends a lot of time in his studio, locked away, and has almost no feedback. But when you come to a fair and see all the work together, it's like the reward for so much time invested. The moment comes and suddenly it all happens in a week, you can see thousands of people coming to see your work. And, well, I like to stand off to the side and listen, because nobody knows I'm the artist, so I put my ear to the ground and listen a bit to what they're saying.

I think the main interest of your work at a fair is that it doesn't go unnoticed, because there are a lot of stimuli, a lot of competing works, and the public sees them quickly. That's why I always focus on bringing very striking pieces that attract a lot of attention. In general, I like fairs a lot and I have a lot of fun wherever they are, I'll tell you, this year, for example, I've been to Kiev, to Korea, to Shanghai, I've been to Art Miami, I've been to Art Madrid, and the truth is that I love it. Wherever there's a fair and there's a work of mine, I try to be there whenever I can.

I.S. Concrete, stone, resine and pigments. 2023.

Are you more artistically inclined to sculpture than painting, or does it depend on the moment in life?

Which gives me more pleasure, painting or sculpture? To be honest, I'm more into sculpture. I am a sculptor. I actually started out as a painter, but I studied sculpture. It's a bit ironic, isn't it? I was 100% self-taught in painting, because I didn't study fine art, but I did a degree in sculpture, where the sculptural knowledge they give you isn't enormous either, it's very basic, nothing out of this world.

Nevertheless, I've always been more interested in sculpture. I think because it has more possibilities and aspects. When you make a sculpture you can go in many directions, you can create materials and develop your own sculptural processes. You use a lot of techniques, materials and tools. There are parts that are design and parts that are modelling, every day you're doing something different and it's also less exploited. Let's say you can be much more innovative in that sense. At least for me, that's what I like the most. I get bored easily and I'm always looking for a challenge. That's why I think there's a greater technical and also creative challenge in sculpture, because it gives you almost unlimited possibilities, I would say.

I love painting and I've been painting for many years. Also, I have done hyperrealism, which is a very complex technique, which is technically very demanding because there is no room for failure - I always say that when you do realism it is very difficult to hide the fact that something is wrong, you have to do things very technically correctly. But it's also true that the process of painting bores me more because it makes me more still, more paused. It's painting, a canvas... it's something more reflective, and maybe I'm more dynamic and experimental. That's why I'm a sculptor.

Where do you think your art is going?

I think my work, especially recently, has been moving towards large works. I've always liked large format, but more and more. All the ideas and all the new projects I have for next year and even more in the long term are large format projects. I'm also looking at installation, which is something I haven't developed enough and I'm determined to do. Technically, I want to make the pieces more complex. They're already quite complex, but I want to go a bit further, especially in terms of materials, and I'm trying to create my own. Sometimes it is impossible, but there is a certain margin to create materials that can be cements with additives or with pigments. I am also trying to recover ancient techniques from the 16th century that are very lost, some sculptural techniques that used to be made with marbling, and I am trying to combine them with other current techniques and materials that give me different results, which is what I am looking for. I want the material to be the hallmark of my work and I want the work to be more contextual, not just a character, but to create an atmosphere. I think that's where I'm going, let's see how it goes.

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.