Artists: Hadaly Villasclaras, Lola Zoido, Marta Galindo García, Clara Ars Mágica, Isabella Benshimol, Pablo Mera, Victoria Acebo, Manu Alba, Carmen Mora, Ángela Jiménez Durán, Aída Salán, Amanda Bouzada, Gabriel Alonso, Darío López, Paumusic, Bruto Madrid, Nada Bien, Jacobo García Andrade, Gador Salís, Julio Galindo, Andrea Muniáin, Pau Jiménez, Mon Cano, Matteo Caro, Caesar Arenas
Exhibition title: EDÉN
Curated and organized by: Casa Antillón (Emmanuel Álvarez, Ismael Santos, Marta Ochoa, Yosi Negrín)
Venue: Casa de Campo, Madrid, Spain
Date: June 13, 2020
Photography: Juan Borgognoni / All images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Casa de Campo, Madrid
..-“Yo recorría aquellos parajes que fueron los de nuestra vida, con la misma espontaneidad y mirando, sin sentir mi mirada […], yo no iba por aquellos senderos del bosque desaparecido a… a nada. Iba, sí, a desposeerme, a dejar de ser. No a olvidar en la nostalgia, sino a darlo todo si hubiera podido darlo todo, y ese todo qué podía ser sino la palabra […] Todo me hablaba, todo me miraba, todo salía a mi encuentro, todo se revelaba, la palabra naciente. Porque yo vivía, sentía nacer la hierba, el polvo mismo, las sombras, todo estaba naciendo y todo crecía”
-(María Zambrano)
We dreamed of coming back to Nature and enjoying the sunlight… We wanted to forget, for an instance, the moment to exist. Let’s celebrate life and collectivity within nature. This new reborn must have a new horizon that we should construct together. Let’s build the possibility of seeing each other, listening and enjoying us. “Casa de Campo”, with its imposing vastness, can hug us all…
In our conversations during these months, we constantly imagined how it will be to see and to touch us again. We agreed we had to go to the park and spend a day there together, walking and laughing. Domesticity transforms now into a domestic exterior. Maybe a picnic on the hill, as Goya illustrated next to this park in Madrid, could be the best way for meeting with snacks and drinks.
We selected 20 special spots from the park, where 20 local artists intervened with site-specific installations, sculptures, performances and paintings during this special day (the first weekend we could go out from our houses in Spain due to covid-19). With a link to Google Maps, visitors had to find each hidden spot across the biggest park of the city.
Eden has become the most challenging project we could have ever done. Edén is urbanism, city, landscape and art. Edén is born almost spontaneously, with the need to look for a ray of light in the face of the dark and fragile situation in which we live. Nothing seems what it was anymore and we do not know how it will be. Collectivity practices are reconciled with nature and the experience of visiting a park is resignified through spontaneity and art. Eden is conceived as a project of contemporary architecture because it understands and reacts to what happens in society and where the city is the protagonist again.
Casa Antillón is an architecture and art collective founded in Madrid in 2016. Marta Ochoa, Ismael López, Yosi Negrín and Emmanuel Álvarez are four architects graduated in 2019 by ETSAM, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
As a group they explore various cultural territories, playing with emerging art experimental exhibitions. In January 2019 their first exhibition was born as Casa Antillón, an exhibition experiment in a domestic space. A second turn in early September of the same year, in collaboration with Casabanchel in which 56 national and international artists participated. This group of friends aspires to understand the architecture from the event, art and cultural management.
