Matadero Madrid center for contemporary creation
Verano, te quiero
By and large, we associate the summertime with good humour, holidays, fun and games, high temperatures... And, above all, with life in the great outdoors, which draws people to the pleasures of the beach, the mountains, the parks... We are reminded of the Swedish proverb that says "a life without love is like a year without summer".
After such a harsh winter, last summer was quite special because it saw the return of summers as we knew them before the lockdown. Encouraged also by the success of the previous exhibition Contra la gravedad, for which young people photographed their elders in unexpected, lively and jovial attitudes (the exhibition was put on in this same space and received almost 20,000 visitors), we decided to embark on a new adventure that would involve more young people in the city of Madrid and would once again seek that communication between the elderly and adolescents. We began by talking to several schools in the capital that were keen to give their students the opportunity to photograph the elderly and to have their photographs displayed in an exhibition in our Nave 10. After the pandemic we had suffered, we thought that portraying the elderly in the summertime through the eyes of happy, fresh and enthusiastic young people could well be a fascinating subject. And indeed it was. The students from the seven secondary schools that have taken part in this exhibition have provided us with very different views on how to experience the summer, but a common thread runs through the exhibition: the joy of wanting to go on living and enjoying life no matter how old you are.
This exhibition is part of the La Sénior project developed by Teatro Español, which seeks to raise the visibility of a sector of society that is very close to our hearts, our senior citizens.