Artivism is defined as the hybridization between art and activism. Claims and resistance art. Visibility, durability and risk are the specific features of an intervention that carries a clear socio-political message. Art becomes a means of communication focused on change and transformation, a language that moves from academic or museum artistic creation to social spaces, becoming an educational tool.

Ángela Lergo

Desde el fondo de un espejo. Narciso, 2019

Piedra con resina y pigmentos naturales, cera y metacrilato

42 x 16cm

Art is an engine that can generate collectivity in individual spaces, and bring resistance to pressure places. Artivism develops a language of freedom and autonomy that moves outside of fixed cultural rules, of academic canons, of aesthetics and the majority tendency. It is an intervention without limits of action, where the conceptual lines of the spaces are blurred.

We could place the origins of artivism in the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century: dadaism, futurism and surrealism. The development of performance, video art or conceptual art throughout the last century are essential elements that cause the dematerialisation of the artistic object, as Valdevieso develops in his article "The symbolic appropriation of public space through artivism".

Carlos Tárdez

San Sebastián, 2018

Resina policromada y dardo

9 x 5cm

The conceptual art of the 50s provides a key feature in the development of artivism: confronting and questioning the idea of producing traditional works of art, where the result is not as important as the process itself. Conceptual artists generate works that cannot be classified according to artistic traditions, often reflecting their political and social disagreement.

We must add to this the social movements of the late last century adjacent to the anti-globalisation that continue to develop in the 21st century through the generation of new visual and interventionist codes in the public space . For the most part, this political-social activation has developed its artistic expression through graffiti and urban art, both environments being the foundational basis of the multiple forms that we can find today within the global concept of artivism. Art Madrid is fortunate to bring together a wide range of new generation artists who naturally are keen on new contemporary discourses, where the concerns substantiated in artivism meet various channels of expression and creative representation.

Gerard Mas

Sarcofag, 2019

Polychrome wood

168 x 45cm

Artivism takes shape through the groups, associations and artists that add their rebel and nonconformist creativity to the struggle. Walls, façades, monuments, statues, fill with colour turning the urban landscape into a true museum of works of art that respond to the needs of a society that expresses its disagreement before a wide spectrum of inequalities and injustices that cross the backbone of the social structure.

Mário Macilau

A candle man, 2019

Pigmento, tinta

80 x 120cm

Around the collective imaginary that composes the paradigm of activism, we find expressions and artistic creations that share and involve a subversive and confrontational discourse despite not strictly fitting within the concept of artivism.

This is the case with the line on which the One Project program is developed this year. Under the title of "Salvajes", in the words of its curator, Fernando Gómez de la Cuesta, the selected artists "paint and sculpt with effort as a form of resistance and do so in an epidermal, superfluous and vertiginous era, where hardly anyone It stops at nothing. A beasts that create from expressiveness, drive or iconoclast, from a passionate, visceral, desacralising or irreverent perspective”.

PichiAvo

Orphical Hymn III to Nike, 2019

Mixed media on canvas

120 x 90cm

Artists such as the duo PichiAvo delve into some ways of doing that have to do with the rupture that begins in the endless collection of pre-existing images and concepts. A task that they carry out from a classic art that they intervene, turn, merge, integrate, repel and connect with urban art and its creation codes.

We can also see the prominence of public space as an essential element of the message in the work of Julio Anaya. His work is born, in most cases, to cease to exist, since it is a work in continuous transit, the eternal return, in development, in a permanent relocation that causes new interpretations and that transforms the spaces.

Julio Anaya

Ohannes Vermeer - Muchacha con sombrero rojo, 2918

Acrílico sobre cartón

51 x 36cm

In transgression and criticism, we can inscribe the work of Andrés Planas who, without responding to any hint of political correctness, constructs a sarcastic message about the strong manipulation of factual powers in today's societies.

Art Madrid thus develops a not so usual part of the art market, giving space to speeches and creations that move away from the legitimate artistic limits and rules.

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.

DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN

As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.

The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.