PERFORMANCE: VOY RASPANDO LA HOJA Y LA VOZ. BY VALENTINA ALVARADO MATOS
Feb 20, 2025
art madrid
RAÍCES AFUERA. PERFORMANCE CYCLE X ART MADRID'25
Art Madrid celebrates twenty years of contemporary art from March 5 to 9, 2025, at the Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles. During Art Week, it becomes an exhibition platform for national and international galleries and artists. In this edition, with the aim of providing a space for artists working in the realm of performance art, the fair presents Raíces Afuera, a performance cycle that explores notions of belonging and the need for rootedness in a contemporary world marked by fragmentation, displacement, and disconnection. Positioned within the fair as a critical and reflective space, the project challenges the individual’s relationship with their environment, community, and sense of identity.
PERFORMANCE: VOY RASPANDO LA HOJA Y LA VOZ. BY VALENTINA ALVARADO MATOS
March 7 | 19:00h. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.
voy raspando la hoja y la voz is a piece that merges image, text, and sound to create a sensory and conceptual journey through the memory of the landscape. Here, the voice becomes a fragmented narrative, a thread weaving together personal memories while reflecting on how landscapes shift, transform, and reconfigure over time and space. The journey, far from being linear, unfolds as a passage between the tangible and the symbolic, blurring the boundaries between the physical place and the language that describes it. The work also explores how certain territories are represented, described, or distorted from different perspectives, questioning dominant narratives. The space being explored is not just a territory, a garden, a park, or a forest—it is also a linguistic construction, a space reimagined through language. The piece invites us to reconsider the borders between the physical and the symbolic, between the real and the narrated.
ABOUT VALENTINA ALVARADO MATOS
Valentina Alvarado Matos (Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1986) is an artist who explores the moving image with a critical eye towards diaspora, landscape and gesture. Her work has been exhibited in important spaces such as Artium, LIAF Biennial, IFF Rotterdam, Punto de Vista, Ambulante, Loop, Cinemateca Madrid, among others. She has been a resident at Hangar, La Escocesa, Cultura. Resident, LIFT Toronto and Matadero.
In 2024 she presents his work in Barcelona with Carlos Vasquez Mendez in the other here at La Capella and full face at La Virreina Centro de la Imagen. In addition to her artistic practice, she has taught at institutions such as Massana, Eina, Universitat de Barcelona, La Universidad del Zulia, LAV, CC Albareda, EICTV in Cuba, among others. Her films are included in the catalogues of distributors such as Light Cone, XCèntric and Hamaca, and her work has been included in the book Remains-Tomorrow Themes in Contemporary Latin American Abstraction by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill.
Valentina Alvarado Matos works in a variety of media, with an emphasis on the tactile qualities of film, and focuses on the materiality and fragmentation of the image. She is interested in how materials leave traces of time and memory. Film and ceramics, the disciplines in which she works, require manual processes that take time and patience, such as manipulating spools, kneading clay, or cutting and splicing strips of film. These deliberate methods contrast with rapid production, and both craft and film are closely linked to tactile gestures and processes in their conceptual and formal approaches. Collage occupies a central place in his work, allowing him to superimpose fragments of images and materials to explore and deconstruct symbolic meanings, particularly around diasporic identity, landscape and belonging. Superimposition is not only a technique in her studio, but also a narrative method that establishes dialogues between the landscape and the body, the personal and the political, the macro and the micro.
