The artist Cristina Mejías transforms Matadero Madrid’s Nave 0 as part of the Abierto x Obras programme

• The exhibition is curated by Soledad Gutiérrez, who will be in conversation with Cristina Mejías today, Thursday, October 23, at 6:00 pm, prior to the opening.
• The Abierto x Obras programme invites contemporary artists to explore the relationship between art and the spaces that host it through newly commissioned works.
• This space, which revolutionised Madrid’s contemporary art scene between 2007 and 2018, was successfully reactivated last season with an intervention by Eva Fàbregas.

Matadero Madrid, the centre for contemporary creation of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport, continues the Abierto x Obras programme with the exhibition Lengua en coro, cuenta, opening today at Nave 0, on view until February 1, 2026. Before the opening, at 6:00 pm, there will be a public conversation between the artist and the exhibition’s curator, Soledad Gutiérrez.

Following the great success of Eva Fàbregas’s installation last season—which inaugurated this new cycle of exhibitions—Cristina Mejías, an artist from Jerez de la Frontera now based in Madrid, takes up the baton with Lengua en coro, cuenta.

This site-specific installation is conceived in dialogue with its setting: the former cold-storage chamber of Madrid’s municipal slaughterhouse, crossed longitudinally by the old drainage channels. Starting from these and from the desire to reactivate this covered and forgotten architectural feature, Mejías invites the audience into an installation where water becomes a sensitive material flowing through a network of sculptural gestures.

Mejías’s work seeks to understand the materiality of how knowledge is built, to grasp how transmission operates, and to explore how each element transforms through contact with others, adding layers of meaning. It is precisely in this evolution that its richness lies.

Lengua en coro, cuenta forms part of a series of projects that the artist began in 2021 during a residency at Pico do Refúgio, in the Azores, which gave rise to her first site-specific installation Knot the Tongue, Grasp a Stream, where water moved through the forest via sculptural elements—an ephemeral mechanism tied to natural materials, impossible to control and poetically fragile.

Building on that first experience—and intersecting with two of her most recent projects, Aprendices errantes (Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, 2023) and Saber de oído (C3A, Córdoba, 2025)—Cristina Mejías now presents this new chapter in her artistic practice, produced and assembled by ArtWorks.

Lengua en coro, cuenta is a fragile and ever-changing ecosystem where there are no hierarchies or ranks: each element depends on another, generating a knot of balances where gravity itself becomes both force and engine. In this imagined landscape, forms and words are polysemic, and the visible and invisible coexist within the narrative.

Cristina Mejías – An Award-Winning Artistic Career

The work of Cristina Mejías (Jerez de la Frontera, 1986) focuses on oral tradition, listening, and storytelling, using sculpture, installation, and video as her main tools. She holds a Fine Arts degree from Madrid and from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin. Mejías developed part of her artistic practice in Berlin before returning to Madrid, where she currently lives and works.

She has recently held solo exhibitions at institutions including C3A (Córdoba), Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid), RoyalMount (Montreal), Centro de Arte Párraga (Murcia), Teatro La Capilla (with Víctor Colmenero Mir, Mexico City), Museo Provincial de Cádiz, Blueproject Foundation (Barcelona), and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia (Maracaibo), among others. Her next exhibition will take place at La Panera (Lleida).

Mejías has received numerous awards, grants, and residencies, including the Illy ARCO Award, IX Premio Internacional Obra Abierta (ex aequo), Fundación ARCO Award 2023, ARCO Comunidad de Madrid Award, Generación 2020, and artist residencies at ArtWorks (in collaboration with the Matadero Madrid Artist Residency Centre), Tabakalera (San Sebastián), and MACZUL (Maracaibo).

The Abierto x Obras Programme

Between 2007 and 2018, the Abierto x Obras programme offered Madrid audiences unique site-specific interventions by artists such as Daniel Canogar, Jannis Kounellis, Román Signer, Carlos Garaicoa, Fernando Sánchez Castillo, Jordi Colomer, Los Carpinteros, Cristina Lucas, Cabello/Carceller, Elena Alonso, and Teresa Solar, among others.

In its new phase, launched last season, Abierto x Obras maintains its original essence: inviting artists to create new works conceived specifically for a given space, exploring the relationship between art and the architectural contexts that host it. The programme remains a strong commitment to promoting contemporary artistic practices that engage directly with their environments.

Matadero Madrid’s Nave 0 has been chosen as the space for these interventions. This former cold-storage chamber of the old municipal slaughterhouse spans more than 800 m², with an open structure punctuated by arches and columns and an original hydraulic tile floor. Its walls and ceilings still bear the marks of a fire that occurred in the 1990s—architectural features that define the setting reactivated last season by Catalan artist Eva Fàbregas for the return of Abierto x Obras to Madrid’s cultural programme. This autumn, the baton passes to Cristina Mejías, while in late February Mónica Mays will take over with a new site-specific intervention.

More information and contact:
comunicacion@mataderomadrid.org