¿Bailar Ahora? (Dancing, Now?) Guillermo Santomà turns the Intermediae nave at Matadero Madrid into an experimental ‘dance floor’

Matadero Madrid presents “Pista de Baile” (Dance Floor), a new site-specific artistic project created by the quite unique artist Guillermo Santomà, with the sponsorship of the Sorigué Foundation and of Simon, in collaboration with Protopixel.

Having accepted the invitation to intervene in the Intermediae nave, Guillermo Santomà has transformed the space by parasitizing it with the same original industrial materials found in the nave itself, cement and iron, and he has then made it disappear only to propose another radically different space instead. The result is a self-supporting structure that emerges as a large sand ceiling, built as if it were the negative image of the architecture in which it is integrated.

In these times of estrangement, social distancing and empty dance floors, Santomà proposes a new space in which to continue to construct ourselves as a cultural community, in which to keep on dancing. No matter whether it is a shell or an abstract cave, the intervention is conceived as an object and as a place at one and the same time, ready to welcome its visitors, but also to be transformed by them. The piece will acquire movement, life, or even a consciousness of its own when it is inhabited. In its interior, the huge ball of light that dominates the space defines the meeting place, as if it were a fire around which people could meet like modern primitives, to invent new rituals for these difficult times we have to live in.

In this way, the dance floor is built between engineering and poetry, between the natural and the synthetic, between the history of architecture and fiction, as the artist tells us through the images of the illustrated storyboard he created to design the installation.

Guillermo Santomà  (Barcelona, 1984). From construction, he works in different formats that encompass design, architecture, sculpture and scenography or performance art.  His installations and design works have been exhibited in the Side Gallery (Barcelona), Etage Projects (Copenhagen and New York), and at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). In his recent exhibition at the Cerralbo Museum in Madrid, he presented 18 artifacts that blended with the space and the House of Cerralbo collection, creating new scenographies that invited visitors to fantasise about new uses and scenes and conversations.

Santomà uses simple mechanisms to alter familiar objects in a constant process of deformation, creating total environments through his radical research into materials, light and colour.  His installations respond to his desire to transform spaces through elements that remind us of objects, furniture, vaguely recognisable structures, elusive reminiscences that avoid being defined but nevertheless introduce into the intervened spaces, fictions that play with the very history of architecture and design.

About Ciudad Bailar - Exagerar (Dance City - Exaggerate)
On 6 November, Intermediae Matadero kicked off ‘Ciudad Bailar · Exagerar’ (Dance City · Exaggerate), a programme of activities comprising laboratories, performance art pieces and radio and online encounters, which will culminate with the celebration of a festival in June 2021. Promoted by Side Thinkers and curated by Massimiliano Casu and Carlos López Carrasco, the project unfolds within the Intermediae space, and has as its framework the experimental dance floor designed by Guillermo Santomà.

The aim of Ciudad Bailar · Exagerar (Dance City · Exaggerate) is to reflect on dancing and movement as an activity that is inherent to human beings, just like yawning or shivering, unconscious actions that express physical and emotional states. It takes as its reference this time of confinement, social distancing and empty dance floors, in which dancing has retreated to people’s homes, video conferences, social networks and all manner of virtual and digital spaces, throwing online parties and generating new forms of interaction.