The Public Presentation of El Ranchito, an artist residency project initiated by Matadero-Madrid, could have been an exhibition of the final pieces. However, evaluating El Ranchito as a research project requires to take into consideration the creators, tools, places, temporalities, and many other agents that define the project. In order to give visibility to all these agents and to integrate them in the presentation the emphasis was shifted from the exhibition to the archive, to reveal simultaneously different phases, times and formats of the project.
For that purpose, all the participants and projects at different stages of development were included, as well as the tools that the working group of El Ranchito put together to intensify the local network of creators: studio spaces, residencies, co-working area, leisure zones and socializing areas that remained active during the four months of the Public Presentation.
As there was not a single narrative that articulated El Ranchito. Therefore, some narratives were constructed “a posteriori” through lines on the floor that, as in archeological sites, organize, distribute and orient through shared concepts through the space.
In front of this amalgamated space a pasarell-observing deck permited to see the whole space at once, and at the same time proposed different points of view and ways of seeing. Built with pallets, it held as well the archive, the library or the documentation space, proposing in its in-betweens socializing spaces as an amphitheater or a bar, while adapting to the structure of the warehouse.
All these strategies were materialized through prefabricated and reusable materials: recycled pallets, plastic curtains and adhesive tape, in the search of a resources economy. In this way the space of the Nave 16 of Matadero was constituted in a complexity in which the absence of hierarchies generated overlap, friction, coupling and collaboration. It reminded a small urban area or an amplified domestic space, which performed as a three-dimensional expanded archive.
Full report here