The seventh edition of L.E.V. Matadero brings together audiovisual performances and extended reality projects
> Among the standout names in this year’s edition are Lorenzo Senni, Myriam Bleau with Nien Tzu Weng, New York-based studio Team Rolfes, and the Italian collective SPIME.IM.
> The Vortex section deepens its focus on extended realities with five award-winning projects from international festivals, including Noire by Stéphane Foenkinos and Pierre-Alain Giraud.
> Fortune Teller, an augmented reality experience for children by French artist Julie Stephen Chheng, will take over Matadero’s Nave Una.
> This year’s audiovisual installations circuit is headlined by Theo Triantafyllidis’s work and an interactive piece by LP Rondeau.
> Tickets for the live performances and extended reality experiences are available at levfestival.com and mataderomadrid.org.
Matadero Madrid, the contemporary creation center of Madrid’s Department of Culture, Tourism and Sports, has unveiled the program for the 7th edition of L.E.V. Matadero, taking place from September 18 to 21. The 2025 edition reaffirms its commitment to showcasing both national and international artists exploring new languages and narratives at the intersection of technology, music, and performance.
This year’s curatorial selection is driven by a desire to offer a critical response to contemporary anxieties, highlighting artistic proposals that seek to understand the present through diverse cultural productions. From works tackling the climate crisis to those reflecting on social precarity, hyperconsumerism, or the pathologization of difference, the festival maps out alternative worlds—revealing, questioning, and reimagining our material reality.
Live shows and audiovisual performances in Nave 10
The festival opens on Thursday, September 18, with Second Self, a hypnotic audiovisual performance by Canadian artist Myriam Bleau and Taiwanese artist Nien Tzu Weng. That same night, the MP3 collective—Arnau Pérez, Pau Vegas, and Fernando Careaga—presents MP3 Live #1, a performative journey where dance and electronic music merge in real time through motion sensors that convert movement into sound.
On Friday, September 19, the groundbreaking 321 Rule by New York studio Team Rolfes takes the stage. Pioneers in motion capture and real-time animation, their performances immerse the audience in a hybrid realm between physical and virtual worlds. Also on Friday, Carmen Jaci and Matthew Schoen premiere a new audiovisual piece exploring the connections between human bodies and digital data.
Saturday, September 20, brings ARS NATURA to Nave 10, an immersive piece by Annabelle Playe, Hugo Arcier, and Rima Ben Brahim that reimagines natural landscapes and brutalist architecture as post-anthropocene simulations. That evening, Italian collective SPIME.IM presents GREY LINE, an intense and sensory exploration of the color grey as a metaphor for the uncertain times we live in.
The festival’s live programming concludes on Sunday, September 21, with Italian composer and producer Lorenzo Senni performing Canone Infinito Xtended, an evolving composition that reconfigures trance music archetypes to express an endless emotional pursuit. To close the festival, Matthew Biederman and Alain Thibault present Incertitude, a performance that fuses algorithmically generated visuals and synthetic sound, investigating the tension between control and randomness.
L.E.V. Matadero ventures into new virtual worlds with its Vortex section
This edition of L.E.V. Matadero once again embraces long-form, interactive virtual and mixed reality works, inviting audiences to dive fully into immersive environments and explore the artistic possibilities of digital media. The Vortex section will be spread across Nave 0, Central de Diseño, and the Taller.
Featured projects include Noire, an immersive augmented reality experience produced by Stéphane Foenkinos and Pierre-Alain Giraud and based on the work of Tania de Montaigne. Created by Novaya Studio, it transports viewers to the racially segregated American South, tracing the erased memory of Claudette Colvin and confronting the invisibility of her story.
Also featured is IMPULSE: PLAYING WITH REALITY, directed by May Abdalla and Barry Gene Murphy—a mixed reality experience exploring the world through the perspective of people living with ADHD.
French artist Adelin Schweitzer presents The Sutherland Test, a performance that explores extended reality from a radically disorienting lens—an unsettling immersion into the blurry edge between technology and human perception.
Carles Castaño Oliveiros presents 2025/…, a mixed reality experience produced by Servicios Inmersivos. This politically charged installation immerses participants in a dystopian digital space that satirically reflects the contradictions of a hyperconsumerist and overwhelmed society.
The section also includes Uncanny Alley, a celebrated VR experience by South African artist Rick Treweek, which guides visitors through the most enigmatic corners of the Metaverse via VRChat.
Augmented city
Part of the festival’s augmented reality program, Fortune Teller by French artist Julie Stephen Chheng offers a poetic experience in which spirit-like creatures connected to natural elements hide throughout the space and are revealed through a free mobile app. Each spirit, once activated, shares desires, fears, or worldviews, offering a gentle and introspective vision that links nature, technology, and philosophy.
Audiovisual installation circuit
Plató at Cineteca Matadero hosts Drift Lattice, a work by artist Theo Triantafyllidis. This immersive simulation of an underwater ecosystem, in which marine life coexists with synthetic waste, evolves in real time based on global climate and ecological data, functioning as a speculative barometer of human impact on ocean health.
Nave Una features Liminal, an interactive installation by LP Rondeau. Using light, sound, and visual technology, this project manifests the threshold between past and present. A 2.75-meter circular structure acts as a portal, capturing visitors’ silhouettes in black and white and projecting them into stretched, fading images that symbolize the relentless passage of time.
The Festival of Visual Electronics and Extended Realities, organized by Matadero Madrid, is curated by L.E.V. (Laboratorio de Electrónica Visual y Realidades Extendidas) in collaboration with Nave 10, Cineteca Madrid, and the Center for Artistic Residencies, with the participation of Central de Diseño. The festival is supported by Taiwan’s Ministry of Culture, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in Spain, the Québec Government Office in Barcelona, and Spain’s Ministry of Culture through public funding for digital creation as part of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan and the EU’s NextGeneration funding. Media partners include Radio 3, OCI Magazine, CLOT Magazine, and Metal Magazine. Visual identity by Teresa Rofer.
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Tickets available now at www.levfestival.com and www.mataderomadrid.org