Natalia Alonso Arduengo retratada por Federico Granell

The critic and independent curator Natalia Alonso Arduengo will be in charge of the curated tour of Art Madrid for the second consecutive year, which, together with the Collecting Program, will form part of "One Shot Collectors".

Natalia Alonso Arduengo (1984, Madrid): Lives in Gijón and works between her place of residence and Madrid. She has a degree in Art History from the University of Oviedo, and she's a critic and independent curator. Part of her interests are oriented to art made by women and focused on gender aspects. In this sense, she has curated shows such as "Perséfone's Fugue" by Cristina Ferrández and Norma Desmond's Syndrome by Cristina Toledo. Another issue towards which she directs her work is living and how the contemporary subject relates to the environment. Under this theme, she was the guest curator of Art Madrid in 2021 with the project "El arte de habitar", which brought together, among others, artists such as Sandra Paula Fernández, Silvia Flechoso, Hugo Alonso and Guillermo Oyágüez.

She has worked for media such as the magazine "Tendencias del Mercado del Arte" and has been at the helm of the blog "Con el arte en los talones" for years, which has now changed to radio format in a program broadcast on RTPA's La Buena Tarde. Currently, she works as Liaison Manager for Arteinformado. She is director of ArteOviedo, a contemporary art fair held in the Principality's capital that brings together a selection of galleries from the region.

Mário Macilau

Breaking news, 2015

Pigmento inyectado

60 x 90cm

ICONOSPHERE

Every image is an artifice. This axiom of Román Gubern sticks in mind like the finger of the recruitment poster made by James Montgomery Flagg, which is the cover of Gubern's book entitled Iconic mass media of the late nineties of the last century. In his final chapter, dedicated to the electronic image, he outlined the future that was to come. Over two decades later, the presence and influence of images in our society are winning the battle of oversupply and over information, from mass media to self-media and the metaverse. The curated selection of works for ARTMADRID22 seeks to reflect on the ways of looking at and the ways of reading images, the subject's interaction with them, and the relationships and influences between them. How do we assimilate and rework images today? What look do we apply to multiform reality?

Lantomo

(un)MASKED FIGHTER, 2021

Grafito, carbón, acuarela sobre papel encolado a madera

130 x 97cm

The curated tour comprises twelve works from different disciplines, among which drawing and photography stand out. The artists that are part of this selection are: Catarina Patrício (Sâo Mamede), Mário Macilau (Galerie Alex Serra), Lantomo (BAT alberto cornejo), Beatriz Díaz Ceballos (Rodrigo Juarranz), Chang Teng-Yuan (Yiri Arts), David Delgado Ruiz (DDR Art Gallery), Juana González (Arena Martínez Projects), Aurora Cañero (Galería Kreisler) , Julien Primard (Galerie LJ), Jaime Sancorlo (Inéditad), Kepa Garraza (Víctor Lope Arte Contemporáneo) y María Treviño (Moret Art).

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: TRAYECTORIA. BY AMANDA GATTI

March 6 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.

Amanda Gatti. Escaparate. 2023. DT-Espacio. Photograph by Pedro Mendes.

The proposal expands Amanda Gatti’s research initiated in La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo — an ongoing series of performance and installation presented since 2023 in spaces such as Fundación Antonio Pérez, Galería Nueva, CRUCE, and the Acción Spring(t)/UCM Congress — where she explores the relationship between her body and objects found in urban space. There, body and materials are articulated through a constant negotiation between functionality, weight, and support, generating temporary architectural compositions.

In Trayectoria, this research shifts toward the act of dragging: a gesture that makes visible the friction between body, objects, and space. The corridor ceases to be a neutrality to be crossed and becomes an operative intermediate zone, where form and content — veil and what is veiled, as Walter Benjamin points out — become confused. The space, saturated with objects turned into a mobile chain, clears and remakes itself with each step. Clearing, for Benjamin, is already an experience of space: each advance sustains this unfinished separation, always oriented toward a destination that may never be reached.

La Plasti Ciudad del Cuerpo #3. Amanda Gatti. Performance documentation. CRUCE 2054 exhibition, Galería CRUCE. Photograph by Pedro Mendes.

Displacement is not limited to material friction: it also becomes a symbolic inscription of that which every life trajectory drags along. The objects — remnants of past uses — function as metaphors for what remains attached to the body even when it no longer serves any function. The performance makes visible the condition of moving forward while carrying heterogeneous weights: material, affective, social. Thus, the gesture of walking linked to these objects turns the route into a writing in motion, where each step simultaneously activates a physical transit and a vital transit. Trayectoria proposes that every life is also a dragging: a continuous recomposing from what we insist on carrying with us.

The action operates objects as verbs: to push, to tense, to trip, to pull. From it emerges an operativity that involves the entire body and exceeds the visual. The image ceases to be representation and becomes gesture: a gesture that founds new spatial forms, that overflows, that produces an ephemeral mode of reappropriation of the corridor.

The trajectory thus becomes an affective map inscribed in the body, a way of merging with the environment by putting past and future, durability and wear, utility and obsolescence into friction. The action returns to public space what was taken from it, but now stripped of function: freed from meaning, freed from commodification, freed to be imagined otherwise.

ABOUT AMANDA GATTI

Amanda Gatti (1996, Porto Alegre, Brazil) is an artist and researcher whose practice unfolds across performance, video, photography, and installation. She explores the intersections of body, object, and space, investigating how we occupy — and are occupied by — the spaces around us. Drawing from experiences of displacement and the observation 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 studied the Master’s in Scenic Practice and Visual Culture at Museo Reina Sofía/UCLM (Spain, 2023) and the Bachelor’s degree in Audiovisual Production at PUCRS (Brazil, 2018), where she received scholarships such as the Santander Universities grant. In Spain, her work has been presented in 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.