Guillermo Santomà: Dance Floor

An invitation to dance? Now? A programme of dance and a programme about dance in these times of estrangement, social distancing and  empty  dance floors, seems the right thing for Dance City · Exaggerate to propose. A project curated by Massimiliano Cassu and Carlos López Carrasco that brings together architecture, art, dance and critical debate: laboratories, performance and online encounters, a path that will culminate with the celebration of a festival in June 2021. And for all this to happen, Guillermo Santomà has entirely transformed the architecture of the Intermediae Nave at Matadero Madrid into a Dance Floor.

Guillermo Santomà, who works in design, architecture and performance, uses simple mechanisms to alter familiar objects in a constant process of deformation, creating total environments through his radical research into materials, light and colour. In this newly created Dance Floor, Santomà has transfigured the space at Matadero by parasitizing it with the same original industrial materials found in the nave itself, cement and iron, and he has then made it disappear only to propose another radically different space instead. The result is a self-supporting structure that emerges as a large, concrete ceiling, built as if it were the negative image of the architecture in which it is integrated and suspended in the air, from whose interior a huge ball of changing light dominates the entire space, transforming it into a magically active place.

No matter whether it is a shell or an abstract cave, the intervention is conceived as an object and as a place at one and the same time, ready to welcome its visitors, but also to be transformed by them. The piece will acquire movement, life, or even a consciousness of its own when it is inhabited. In its interior, the huge ball of light that dominates the space defines the meeting place, as if it were a fire around which people could meet like modern primitives, to invent new rituals for these difficult times we have to live in. Santomà proposes a new space in which to continue to construct ourselves as a cultural community, in which to keep on dancing.  In this way, the dance floor is built between engineering and poetry, between the natural and the synthetic, between the history of architecture and fiction.

“It seems only logical that we should take shelter in that cement cave, to make things easy for us and to create an extension that can listen to the community from this natural way of being in a place that is really beautiful even though it’s a place you recognise and is hard, like us. A cave in which you can imagine yourself listening to really loud music or any other type of transaction that has little to do with art, except for the desire of art and artists to be there. That ceiling and that light by Guillermo Santomà say just that: I want to be here, with you. Entering and leaving a cave, seems to be a sound proposition“ (From the text by Chus Martínez, “Yes to Everything”; full text at intermediae.es)

Guillermo Santomà, born Barcelona, 1984. His installations and design works have been exhibited in the Side Gallery (Barcelona), Etage Projects (Copenhagen and New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and Museo Cerralbo (Madrid).

“Dance City · Exaggerate” is a programme of debate and activities promoted by Side Thinkers and curated by Massimiliano Casu and Carlos López Carrasco.

Intermediæ is a programme of Matadero Madrid devoted to the production of transdisciplinary artistic projects based on experimentation and shared learning. Childhood, ecology, the assertion of personal memories, civic engagement, mediation, and the right to the city are some of the issues that articulate a collectively generated proposal.

Dance Floor is sponsored by the Sorigué Foundation and by Simon, in collaboration with Protopixel, who have contributed to the development of the design of the piece.