Real Madrid at Sans titre (2016)

Artists: Real Madrid

Exhibition title: The Swamp

Curated by: Sans titre (2016)

Venue: Sans titre (2016), Paris, France

Date: March 22 – April 20, 2019

Photography: Aurélien Mole / all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and Sans titre (2016)

“Narcissus’ fist sinks in the muddy bottom of the pond whose surface still mirrors a reversed image of youth.

Swamps are places of slow fertility, whose shapes develop slowly through accumulation, from sediments building on one another. Their characters evolve through sickly modular structures repeating themselves. Their sexual allure is calm and deadly, shrouded by bionetwork of flowers showing off their open buttholes and with them the genetic state of their species. In the swamp, lust doesn’t occur in horny uncontrollable rushes. A quiet sex appeal pervades the entire biosystem and rests under the water surface. When the wind blows or the rain falls we hear everything moaning. The water is turbid, but not dirty, so full of life and organisms as to render it dark and slimy, just a step away from being solid. On some parts of the surface a variety of water grass grows, creating the greatest trap for you to fall in.

Flowers are an immense investment of energy for the plant, therefore their existence is usually reserved for the surplus of springs, or to one full moon a year. Those are times for sexting, hairdos, tempting bees. But also, you never know if the bee that’s coming will kill you or pollinate you (lolz, maybe you are one of those insect-killer plants). Tongues pop out of floating leaves licking the surrounding air, capturing and swallowing little mosquitos, while seducing all other beings around. This constant tension of waiting for somebody to come and deflower me sounds like the sexual silence of adolescence: “- But everybody got laid already. Why haven’t I”?

Let’s spend hours eating chips in bed, taking photos of flourished décolletés with mobile swamps in which youth reflects and falls and drowns.”

– Real Madrid

Real Madrid was founded in 2015 as a platform for collaboration that focuses on sexual development and identity through exhibitions and visual installations. The name plays with the concept of competitive spirit and its transformation into merchandise, questioning authorship and self-celebratory creative processes. Claiming their status as an imitation of an overpriced brand bases Real Madrid’s practice where politics collide with intimacy. Real Madrid addresses the media coverage of sport as an example of a collective sense of belonging and by extension a territorial competition. An interest in miscommunication led to choice of a name that makes it problematic to spread and track images of the work on search engines.

Real Madrid has shown its work in solo shows at Silicon Malley (Lausanne) at Villa Itororo’s casa 8 (Sao Paulo) and in numerous group shows including the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Kunsthalle Freeport in Berlin and with Sans titre (2016) in Paris and Marseilles.

Real Madrid took part in the “Les Urbaines” festival in Lausanne, and was awarded the Swiss Art Award in Basel in 2018, after being a finalist in the “Bourse de la Ville de Genève”.