The Centre is much more than the sum of all the public and private institutions that make it up, that give it a unique life and identity, and make it the venue for the city's main cultural events and a meeting point for local and international creation. Las Plazas de Música en Vivo (Live Music in the Squares); Music Day; the Matadero L.E.V. Festival of Visual Electronics; the RAYO Festival of Expanded Visual Arts; Cine-Documenta Madrid (the Madrid International Documentary Film Festival); Animario, the International Contemporary Animation Festival of Madrid; Capítulo Uno (Chapter One), the Matadero Madrid International Literature Festival; and Tentacular, the Critical Technologies and Digital Adventures Festival are now unmissable events in the city's cultural calendar, as are the Playing Spaces proposed by artists for the Intermediae Nave, the annual residents' exhibition, the international exhibitions, the continuous video art programme of the Profundidad de Campo (Depth of Field) programme, and the activities of the Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives (IMNA), a laboratory for creation and research that addresses the climate crisis through art, fiction and other strategies for citizen mobilisation.
Matadero is also a space that promotes inclusion and diversity, that carries out specific projects for different communities, that proposes a wide variety of programmes in its squares and halls, with experimental and quality initiatives. It works as a watchful radar to propose a programme capable of reacting in a flexible way to new social challenges in the face of which culture activates itself as a tool for change. It is a Centre for conversation and debate, a Centre that promotes more contemporary creation and critical thinking and that contributes to the renewal of ideas and artistic languages. And it does so through its experimental mediation programmes, Matadero Education; the independent study programme Matadero Critical Studies; and through its association with action and research communities with which it co-creates content and programming.
We live in a time in which our experience of the world is changing at a speed that leaves us barely able to react. From the world of culture, we need a new imagination with which to conceptualise the implications of the constant crises that challenge us.
- How can art contribute to raising awareness of the planetary emergency and to the expansion of new imaginaries and narratives for another ecological discourse.
- New radical architectures: The city as a stage for the major contemporary challenges.
- The value of literature as true collective intelligence.
- Artistic and cultural practices in the face of the prevailing regulations in such emergency contexts as the 'migration crisis', dissident gender subjectivities, or different physical and intellectual capacities.
- The inevitable impact of technological and scientific development on our lives. The importance of interdisciplinary artistic practices in contemporary culture, the intersection of art, science and the humanities.
- Play and childhood.
These are some of the lines that define the thematic axes with which Matadero Madrid endeavours to contribute to thinking the present and imagining the future.
