María Jerez’s new exhibition at Matadero Madrid invites families to play by transforming the landscape

• The artist presents the participatory exhibition It Takes a Village to Move a Desert, which proposes play as a collective experience for children and adults alike
• Built around the idea of a playground, the space transforms as it is walked through, touched, and activated by those who inhabit it
• At the crossroads of choreography, cinema, and visual arts, María Jerez’s work focuses on fostering performative encounters with otherness as a space for transformation

Matadero Madrid, a contemporary creation centre of the Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport, presents It Takes a Village to Move a Desert, María Jerez’s second exhibition for children. Open in Nave Una until 8 February, the installation creates a tactile and sound-based landscape made up of textiles of different sizes, colours, and textures. Using pulleys and other mechanisms, the pieces invite visitors to lift, move, turn, blow, or gently touch them. This soft, shifting environment also observes, alters, and welcomes its visitors, allowing them to enter, pass through, disappear, and reappear.

The Madrid-based artist proposes an open, unguided form of play that is activated through collective experience. Children and adults can move together through textile spaces, pull on ropes, dress the architectural elements of Nave Una, insert their bodies between the fabrics, listen to the wind, and watch fabric dunes grow or materials shift. Each journey generates multiple landscapes and offers visitors the chance to become one of them through observation.

It Takes a Village to Move a Desert is part of the family-oriented programme developed by Matadero Madrid’s Education and Audiences Department and continues the research María Jerez began in 2024 within the Situ-akzioak programme at Tabakalera in Donostia. This series of exhibitions revisits the idea of the playground, proposing a space that transforms as it is traversed, touched, and activated by those who inhabit it. In doing so, Matadero Madrid reinforces its commitment to bringing contemporary creation closer to children, allowing it to be experienced directly, playfully, and collectively.

About María Jerez

María Jerez (Madrid, 1978) works at the intersection of choreography, cinema, and visual arts, with a practice that places the body and lived experience at the centre of her work. Her background in performance and the performing arts is reflected in this exhibition, where the visible and the invisible, the human and the non-human, intertwine to question the limits of representation and the position of the spectator.

Her work has developed in international contexts, in dialogue with other artists and collectives, and continues to expand the boundaries of the stage into everyday life. Through her projects, María Jerez invites us to rethink the relationship between art and life, and to strengthen performative encounters with otherness as potential spaces for discovery and transformation.

Practical information is available on the Matadero Madrid website.

More information and contact:

comunicacion@mataderomadrid.org