El Ranchito

I contribute to Critical Practice and following Parade we have been invited to participate in El Ranchito. El Ranchito is a cultural experiment launched at the Matadero in the city of Madrid.

The Matadero is a new cultural centre being installed in a disused slaughterhouse in the south of Madrid. The Matadero operates under the umbrella of Municipality of Madrid and their aim is to rejuvenate / gentrify an abandoned area of the City. The Matadero is gaining recognition from its neighbouring communities as being a positive and necessary.

The slaughterhouse worked between the early 20th century until late 1970s, from then it was complete abandoned and became a problematic area with high level of crime, drugs and prostitution.

The investment in the whole of Matadero is estimated at €100 million, funded by the municipality of Madrid. Once the construction works are finished – projected to be in March 2011 – Matadero will consist of various cultural centres; including visual art, performing arts, archives, cinema and music venues as well as independent not-for-profit organisations  within the “container” of Matadero.

Matadero’s footprint is vast; 148.350 m2 (486.713 ft2).

The idea is to create a cultural hub. Although what seems novel is the plan to have a decentralised structure of more or less independent art and art organisations. In the process of this massive undertaking El Ranchito project was established as a kind of laboratory

We went to Madrid for a week to begin to research and develop prooposals in the context for the invitation.

 El Ranchito aims to achieve the following objectives:

1)  Facilitate dialogue, knowledge exchange and the sharing of experiences among local and international artistic agents.

2) Be a place of work, reflection, sharing and a meeting point for artistic agents in the city. A place to experiment with collective and participatory methodologies.

3) For El Ranchito to become a sounding-board for non-commercial artists, creative projects and processes in the city of Madrid.

4) Create links through El Ranchito, between the various institutions involved in Matadero Madrid.
 

The first phase of El Ranchito aims for research, reflection and exhibition from March 2010 to September 2011.

You can read Critical Practice's research reports.
 

Related events include an account of Mudlark a Waste Walk the evolution of Live Tracing the evolution of the Relational Machine, or see how the Procesos de Archivo project developed.