Los Afijos (Affixes)

Matadero Madrid presents Los Afijos (affixes), a site specific intervention that  Juan López (Cantabria, 1979) made for the Abierto x Obras programme (Open for Works), that takes place in the former cold storage room of the abattoir in Legazpi. The artist's proposal sets a sculptural intervention on the architecture as a form of resistance against the establishment.

Los Afijos (affixes), are linguistic sequences which precede, succeed or are insert into a word to alter its meaning. This intervention, made specifically for the Abierto x Obras programme (Open for Works) of Matadero Madrid, works with the relation between writing and architecture, sign and meaning, sculpture and collage. In a hiper-conected world, filled with signs created by an intellectual and/or social elite, López plays with the possibility of giving birth to new meanings, new spaces and other sensitive realms through the creation of renewed signs that compose different spaces. Thus, new meaning is given to speech and to architecture which in turn changes the way we relate with each other in this space.

From his early works of urban intervention, the work of Juan López aims at revealing all the ways in which we can perceive a place as a hypothesis for other social relationships outside the mandatory impositions of power. In his work, he uses metaphors to break and recompose the links between these three elements: city, subjectivity and power.

Juan López has shown his work in numerous art galleries, art centres, fairs and national and international museums such as La Casa Encendida, MUSAC, Centro de Arte Laboral, Fundación Joan Miró, La Panera, O.K. Centrum Tokyo Wonder Site or Den Frie.

He has also been awarded with several prizes and scholarships such as Hegnspl-Award Byens Hegn, Generaciones 2013, Premio ABC de Arte, Beca Fundación Marcelino Botín or Muestra de Arte INJUVE.

Abierto x Obras (Open for Works), in Matadero Madrid, is a site specific interventions programme that invites artists to make a new production piece as incentive for the contemporary experimental creation through proposals that explore the relationship between art and the venue that hosts it: the former cold storage room of Matadero, the abattoir.