Leonor Serrano Rivas: Endless Theatre

What spaces can artists imagine for girls and boys to play? How can a cultural institution experiment and offer new experiences for children?

Endless Theatre, by Spanish artist Leonor Serrano Rivas, is a site-specific installation that alters physical space and perception by means of a labyrinth of reflective surfaces, elastic screens and sound.

It is a playground in which the reflected images of the visitors are displayed within a labyrinthine space of soft, light and tactile architectures. Almost in the open air, among sheets hanging in the dark, sensations punctuate the narrative: walking without a horizon, an upstairs without a downstairs, echoes and footprints that last as long as a ride on a merry-go-round, pushing and running, looking for oneself in the background and being a figure, a column, an actor.

In this field, the spectator deforms each room with their fingers and the scene is amplified and distorted, it grows and trembles. On the other side: echoes, noises, a scurrying about that darts all over the place—over here, now over there—in a game everyone can play. Wooden silhouettes give shape to this labyrinth in which a multiplicity of colours can be made out in the half-light, and thus we witness the delightful perplexity of looking with new eyes: a new direction, the same meaning. Behind the mirror, but inwards.

What would Kiesler think of this great Ouija board that salutes him and his Endless Theatre with its finger? His endless theatre that now hangs suspended in the air like an amazing phantasmagoria? A field enclosed in a forest of columns perpetually repeated and traversed by a tactile, silhouetted and chimerical geometry in which the game is the actor and we the set, reflected movement, the dream of the other. A scene in which to pursue the game, an imagined field and endless hopscotch without rules. Diego Delas

Playgrounds / Models for a city is a cycle of artistic interventions based on the need to dedicate more spaces for children in contemporary cities and cultural institutions. Playgrounds are tangible or intangible scenarios that encourage unexpected appropriations and uses, practical experiments on the right to play, or sensitive environments in which to relate to children. Intermediae Matadero has invited different artists, researches, policy makers as well as citizens to reflect on the concept of “play” and its possible derivations. Their proposals take as their starting point the belief that through play and the resulting disruption of institutionalized norms of behavior, it is possible to generate new social relations.

Leonor Serrano Rivas (Malaga, 1986) works with different media such as performance art, video, sculpture and installations to create scenarios that interweave art and architecture, theatre and movement. Using “source texts” as a starting point—which range from archival, documentary, theoretical or historical material—she establishes a process of creative re-reading based on a logic of the imaginary, where dreams and fiction are treated as legitimate forms of knowledge. She has recently been nominated for the Cervezas Alhambra 2019 Awards, the 2016 Botin Foundation International Visual Art Scholarship; the ARCO 2016 Solán de Cabras Young Artist Award; ICA London New Contemporaries, and the 2014 Caja Madrid Generation Scholarship. Her work has been exhibited in such venues as Serpentine Galleries, Chisenhale Studio, Arcade Gallery (London), CA2M (Madrid) or C3A Centre for Contemporary Creation (Cordoba).

Intermediæ Matadero is a space for the production of artistic projects that promotes public involvement in the cultural production of the neighbourhood and the city. In 2007, it opened the Matadero Madrid complex and since then it has functioned as a do-tank, inspiring, through practice, some of the principles that have permeated it: participation, connectivity, innovation, accessibility, diversity and experimentation, among others. Based on a philosophy of open culture, the annual programme is aimed at all audiences and consists of round tables and debates, exhibits, cycles, exhibitions and workshops.