Climate Shelter: 'Un cuarto de estar para la ciudad'

Between July 1st and 31st, Intermediae proposes extending the opening hours of Nave Una, operating as a climate shelter. This consolidates the initiative successfully launched in 2025, which over 11,000 people enjoyed. In this "living room" (cuarto de estar), culture is experienced as a physical, creative, and intellectual refuge from the elements.

The idea of "home" connects us with the concept of shelter through well-being rather than danger. It also explores a space where inspiring and critical forms of coexistence and exchange are currently being tested—based on care in its broadest sense: friendship, family, collective living, flatmates, and neighborhood relations. Building on this image, the nave is transformed into Un cuarto de estar para la ciudad (A Living Room for the City), a space and programme for taking refuge in the kinds of cultural practices we might carry out in our own living room, combined with what we wish to do if we could explore new dimensions and new ways of being with others. It is a place for hospitality and encounter, where artistic and domestic cultural practices develop—ranging from being together and sharing, to cinema, writing, conversation, and listening. It is a proposal that explores the question of that space between the intimate/private and the public, leading us to a common space articulated through culture.

In this edition of Un cuarto de estar para la ciudad, the perspective of community and dwelling takes center stage. What communities inhabit Intermediae, and how are new ways of dwelling and intertwining produced in (a) Cuarto de estar? What community inhabits and forms within a cultural vegetal space? What communities are formed around practices like listening, writing, cinema, or reading? What ideas of kindness and care enable hospitality in a space? Who acts as host, who welcomes, and who is welcomed in a temporary, moving, rotating, and constructive community? What moments and situations unite us as a collective?

The search for a common space between the public and private, sound and performativity, creation and observation, action and being, forms an affective context that overflows the purely spatial. The need to seek shelter from the heat is resignified as a cultural device capable of triggering the construction of affective, temporary, and moving communities (rather than stable or self-referential ones). This intuition leads us to prioritize a spatiality and temporality where stillness, play, philosophy, poetry, art, the unforeseen, the urban, literature, orality, music, storytelling, and encounters transform our "I" into "we." As a community that evolves within a more-than-human framework, it is intertwined with the vegetal world that also inhabits the living room and forms part of the community.

From a community perspective, Un cuarto de estar invites artists and collectives working from a practice defined by openness and co-production. It involves other people—a multitude that dances, writes, and listens—extending the notion of authorship to the community that creates and gives it meaning. This perspective translates to the space itself, which finds its meaning in the "other," in the communal, and is constituted by countless possibilities, exposed to an audience capable of completing it. Beyond the limits of a stable conception of community, it invokes a multiplicity of practices and cultures, the plural of the communities that inhabit or experience this space. A radically public approach that recognizes visitors, participants, neighbors, communities, and passers-by as its meaning and purpose, alongside issues such as sustainability and the environmental footprint of a programme based on proximity and weaving the local territory.

Part of these communities and bodies in alliance include those from active projects in Usera and Arganzuela—such as those promoted by the Intermediae Distribuido open call, which are incorporated into the programme. Yuan iuan will share materials and conversations about the project Where is my friends______? in an open studio format. Gada 7 will present, together with the protagonists of the process, the final piece and exhibition Desconstrucción de las violencias a través del cuerpo, followed by a community of young people who will design workshops and routes to prevent and raise awareness about climate change. Also noteworthy is Spasticus Artisticus, a community linked to Matadero Madrid that brings together people with disabilities, neurodivergent individuals, psychiatric patients, or those with long-term illnesses, who have accompanied the centre throughout this year. Cuarto de estar will also host the conception of a community inhabited by the living and those who are no longer with us, all present in a shared writing space with Inés Plasencia and Las Lindas Pobres. A community that listens, reads, dances, and composes music will intertwine with Josephine’s Soundscapes, Marco Padiya, Marta Echaves, and Natalia Piñuel. To close the programme, a moving community will guide us on a nocturnal and sonic drift around the river—the city’s heritage and the best refuge from the heat—led by Iren Márquez Dos Santos and Euyín Eugene.

The space features plants on loan from the Unidad de Producción Vegetal de Viveros Estufas del Retiro, under the Subdirección General de Parques y Viveros of the Madrid City Council, cared for by urban botany expert Elena Páez (Planthae).

PROGRAMME OF ACTIVITIES:

>Estudio abierto (Open Studio) Yuan iuan From June 30th to July 3rd in the Nave Una Terrarium, 12:00 PM – 5:00 PM.

>Construyendo comunidad desde la autodefensa. Encuentro popular de deportes de contacto (Building Community Through Self-Defense. Popular Contact Sports Meeting) Gada 7, in collaboration with Guantes Manchados and Asociación Gata Tramuntana. Sunday, July 5th at Nave Una, 6:30 PM.

>Tarde en Un cuarto de estar para la ciudad de la mano de Spasticus Artisticus (An Afternoon at a Living Room for the City with Spasticus Artisticus) Thursday, July 9th

• Incluir salidas. Una presentación cuando se pudo Presentation of the publication Sintomatologías: aprendizajes espásticos by Elena Prous, with Vito Gil-delgado, Ana Castro, and Maite Barrera, in collaboration with the Matadero Madrid Artist Residency Centre. At 5:30 PM.
• Spasticus Artisticus Presentation of the project with the organizing group and the participation of Gustavo A. Díaz and Blanki Izuzquiza. At 6:15 PM.
• Ecstatic Dance Session with Izaskun Barbárie. From 6:45 PM onwards.

>Madrid 360 Joven Organized by the Madrid City Council Youth Department. Friday, July 10th, 4:00 PM – 9:00 PM.

>Comunidades emocionales. Escritura con quienes no están (Emotional Communities. Writing with Those Who Are No Longer Here) Inés Plasencia Camps and Las Lindas Pobres. Wednesday, July 15th at 7:00 PM.

>Tardes de escucha y refugio (Afternoons of Listening and Refuge) Curated by Campos de Marte + Performance by Marco Padiya. With contributions from Marta Echaves (Caja Negra) and Natalia Piñuel. Wednesday, July 22nd and Thursday, July 23rd at 7:00 PM.

>Transferencia Euyín Eugene and Iren Márquez Dos Santos. Thursday, July 30th at 8:30 PM.