The fame of this place, a melting pot of creativity and a haven for uprooted and unorthodox art, still represents the Bohemian spirit of yesteryear, when it was the cradle of some of the most important pictorial movements of the 19th century. But what factors met in this neighbourhood to become what it was?

Jules Grün. Motmartre's Song, 1900 Litographic proof for a cover © Private colection (image from caixaforum.es)

Montmartre was an independent population, which, in 1860, was added to the city of Paris to become its eighteenth district. The proliferation of brothels, cabarets and show halls of scant reputation made the neighbourhood a very badly considered area that, nevertheless, strongly attracted some artists. The reasons were diverse, but above all, gentrification phenomenon stands out. Napoleon III, together with his leading urban designer Baron Haussmann, wanted to make Paris the most beautiful city in Europe. As a result, there was an ordering of the centre and the displacement of groups of citizens who were relocated to nearby towns, as happened in Montmartre.

Maxime Dethomas, “Poster Montmartre”, 1897 (image from nataliamartinlago.com)

This hill was also the main stage of the Franco-Prussian War, which took place between 1870 and 1871, and the rise of the revolutionary movement "the Paris Commune". Turned into a battlefield, chance made that its name, "mount of martyrs" gained meaning after the numerous casualties in the French army. At the end of the conflict, in 1873, the National Assembly agreed to build the Basilica of Sacré-Cœur in homage to the fallen. Today this temple is an emblem of the neighbourhood that shines on the hill illuminated by the sun and can be seen from the old city.

Pierre Marie Louis Vidal, Cover of “La Vie à Montmartre” (detail), 1897. Litography © Private collection / Photographer: Elsevier Stokmans Fotografie (image from caixaforum.es)

We can imagine that an atmosphere full of meaning like the one that reigned at the end of the 19th century, in a marginal neighbourhood, punished by war, decadent, indecent and proud was a natural refuge for those who wanted to live outside the system. They wanted to be free from the confining of liberalism, the formalities of high society, the artifices of Parisian pomposity and life away from the real vital pulse that connects the human passions, good and bad, in an environment where they can run freely. To all this ideological context joins, of course, money, because survival is easier and cheaper in a neighbourhood of a bad reputation.

View of the exhibition room in CaixaForum (image from caixaforum.es)

This set of elements constituted the breeding ground of an unprecedented cultural flowering. The artists met and shared experiences around the Bateau-Lavoir, a building that served as a welcome centre for many creators and where Picasso and Modigliani were at the beginning. Montmartre and, on the opposite bank of the Seine, Montparnasse were the cradle of a creative interest that fed back. Pissarro and Johan Jongkind, and then Renoir, Van Gogh, Degas, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gen Paul, Villon and many others set at that time several associations of artists and consolidated a link today inseparable between the neighbourhood and art. With their determination and their desire to be above the established canons, they managed to write a chapter of their own in the history of world art.

We recommend you take advantage of the last days of the exhibition "Toulouse-Lautrec and the spirit of Montmartre" at CaixaForum Madrid, to relive a part of that time and immerse yourself in an episode of history that brings together 350 works from around the world (untill May 19th).

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.