Cristina Mejías intervenes in Matadero Madrid’s Nave 0 as part of the “Abierto x Obras” program

• The installation Lengua en coro, cuenta seeks to establish a dialogue with the building through the disused drainage channels of the former cold-storage chamber
• Curated by Soledad Gutiérrez, the exhibition will include a public conversation between the curator and the artist on Thursday, October 23 at 6 p.m., ahead of the opening.
• The “Abierto x Obras” program invites contemporary artists to explore the relationship between art and the spaces that host it, through newly created site-specific works.
• This space, which revolutionized Madrid’s contemporary art scene between 2007 and 2018, was successfully reactivated last season by Eva Fàbregas.

Matadero Madrid, the contemporary creation center of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports, continues the “Abierto x Obras” program with the exhibition Lengua en coro, cuenta, inaugurated by artist Cristina Mejías in Nave 0 on October 23. Prior to the opening, at 6 p.m., a conversation will be held with curator Soledad Gutiérrez.

Following the acclaimed intervention by Eva Fàbregas, which opened this new cycle of exhibitions last season, Cristina Mejías —a Jerez-born artist based in Madrid— now takes up the baton with Lengua en coro, cuenta.

This site-specific project engages directly with the space it inhabits: the former cold-storage chamber of Madrid’s municipal slaughterhouse, crossed by the drainage channels that once ran its length. Starting from these forgotten, covered structures and the desire to reactivate them, Mejías invites the audience to enter an installation where water becomes a sensitive material, flowing through a network of sculptural gestures.

Mejías seeks to understand the materiality of knowledge-building —to grasp the mechanisms of transmission and how each element transforms upon contact with another, adding layers of meaning. It is precisely in that evolution where its richness lies.

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

Building on that initial experience and following her recent projects Aprendices errantes (Museo Patio Herreriano, Valladolid, 2023) and Saber de oído (C3A, Córdoba, 2025), Mejías now presents this new chapter in her work, produced and installed by ArtWorks.

Lengua en coro, cuenta is a fragile, mutable ecosystem without hierarchies, where each element depends on another, forming a knot of balances in which gravity becomes both engine and force. In this imagined landscape, forms and words are polysemous, and the visible and invisible intertwine to shape the narrative.

Cristina Mejías: An Award-Winning Artistic Career

The work of Cristina Mejías (Jerez de la Frontera, 1986) remains attentive to oral tradition, listening, and storytelling, using sculpture, installation, and video as her main tools. She holds a BFA from Madrid and the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) in Dublin. After developing part of her artistic practice in Berlin, she returned to Madrid, where she currently lives and works.

She has recently held solo exhibitions at institutions such as 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 upcoming projects include a solo show at La Panera (Lleida).

She has received numerous awards, residencies, and grants, including the Illy ARCO Award, the IX Obra Abierta International Prize (ex aequo), the Fundación ARCO Award (2023), the ARCO Comunidad de Madrid Prize, Generación 2020, and residencies at ArtWorks (in collaboration with Matadero Madrid’s Center for Artistic Residencies), Tabakalera (San Sebastián), and MACZUL (Maracaibo).

The “Abierto x Obras” Program

In its first stage (2007–2018), “Abierto x Obras” offered Madrid audiences unique 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 this new phase, relaunched last season, the program maintains its essence —inviting artists to create new works conceived specifically for a given space, exploring the relationship between art and the environments that host it, and reaffirming Matadero Madrid’s commitment to promoting contemporary artistic practices that engage closely with their context.

Nave 0 at Matadero Madrid is the chosen venue for these interventions. This former cold-storage chamber, with its 800 m² open plan, arcade-like structure of columns and arches, and original hydraulic flooring, still bears the marks of a fire that occurred in the 1990s. These architectural features define the setting that Eva Fàbregas transformed last season for the program’s return to Madrid’s cultural scene —and that this autumn welcomes Cristina Mejías.
At the end of February, Mónica Mays, a Madrid-born artist, will take over with a new site-specific intervention.

More information and contact:
comunicacion@mataderomadrid.org