Matadero Madrid center for contemporary creation

From February 2020 to July 2022

Una fiesta salvaje (A Wild Party)

A project by Violeta Gil and Helena Mariño with the collaboration of Cynthia Smart

“Real poetry is a party, a wild party, a party where anything can happen. A party from which you may not be able to return". Dorothea Lasky

Una Fiesta Salvaje is a study, writing and research group focused on exploring the hybrid terrains of creation that have the body and the word at their core: every creative act that is on the edge, scrapes against the limits and puts its own centre in crisis. To inform this search, the collective works with a series of guest creators, thinkers and researchers. The meetings are documented to thereby form a residency archive that is open to the public, in which they draw maps, lines that lead from one place to another and help to think about creation from non-canonical places.

We think about words through the simple act of reading, but also by analysing how they are used in medicine, in architecture, in film, in music, in parks, in love. We ask ourselves how spaces and relationships are built or can be built in the 21st century through a broad awareness of language. Howe we can transform life at its most immediate. Somewhere between music and poetry there is room for another type of being, a way of explaining new ideas out loud, thinking about writing from a place that makes action possible. Poetry has always been associated with dance, with the body, since the dawn of time, poetry, says Dorothea Lasky, is a wild party.

Our residency got under way in September 2020 with a question: “Who owns language?”. We are now in our second year as residents at the CRA and we are still asking ourselves questions: What presences are possible today, what materiality can we imagine in a world in which there is no longer any skin? Can we think of the voice above and beyond the discourse for which it is a vehicle? Will the voice survive its memory? What is a liveable life? Can I put a song on for you? How do you calculate the space of a home? How is trauma transmitted? How do you escape from the yes/no, all/nothing? What does it mean to think in public and to think in solitude? What would Cristina Morales be like at home? What age were you when you had your first period? What did your mother tell you? The first thing I asked was if it was snowing there. When did I start to not tolerate weakness? Where do our privileges take us and where do they not allow us to go? Who creates the need in us to read, and who creates the need in us to read what? What day is it today? Or, as Marina Garcés asked, “How can we relearn, today, to imagine the city together, and, consequently, the world we want?”

Poetry may not save us, ma calma i nervi.

Una fiesta salvaje are Helena Mariño and Violeta Gil, with the collaboration of Cynthia Smart the graphic support of Leticia Bernaus. Una Fiesta Salvaje are also all those who talked to them during the course of the residency: Jazmina Barrera, María Bastarós, Tálata Rodríguez, Andrea Chapela, Elena López Riera, Hanif Abdurraqib, Berta García Faet, Andrea Aguilar, Sabina Urraca, Mucha Muchacha, Violeta, Mara Valderrama, Elisa Ferrer, Natalia Litvinova, Raquel López, Chenta Tsai, M. Benito, Adrián Ruiz Lolo, Alicia Regodón, Olga García Domínguez, Alba Lara, Kelsi Vanada and everyone who took part in the MEC workshop that was held between September and December 2020 at the CRA.

Photograph by Leticia Bernaus