They are not easy times for culture, neither in Spain nor in the rest of Europe, but it is our obligation to continue working to maintain and make grow as far as possible this Meeting that in its eight years of existence, and from the absolute independence, has become a national and international reference in Performance Art. Also is part of our job as artists and organisers rebalance our battered rality, as the performer Guillermo Gómez-Peña says in his lecture "Art and Life, Life and Art", "... the politicians have taken our imagination and replaced it with fear...", so, it is time to make and effort to the contrary.
This year, Action!MAD11 will be developed in four different venues over three weeks: OffLimits, La Casa Encendida, Matadero Madrid and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and the Meeting will end with a performance deluxe in the Public Space: Llorenç Barber and Montserrat Palacios will offer a full day concert of bells in the pool of Madrid's Retiro Park on Sunday 27th November.
The two sessions of Action! MAD11 which will take place at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía have been devoted entirely to "Performance Saga", a research project on women pioneers of Performance Art in Europe and America in the sixties and seventies; and as every year, in recognition of they outstanding contribution to the Performance Art, more than fifty percent of our program are women.
As last year, realizing the need to create a new net of artists who can benefit from the experience of those who preceded them and so that they contribute their own ideas and views, we again work with the European University of Madrid hosting the work of four students from the Faculty of Arts and Communication, elected by their own Faculty. Also this year we organize again a workshop in collaboration with the Antonio de Nebrija University, as well as beginning a long term collaboration project with the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The editorial project dedicated to Critical Space within Acción! MAD, which began in 2010 with the publication of the first number of "Efímera" Magazine, continues this year with the edition of numbers two and three through the efforts of its director Zara Rodríguez Prieto. Number two, entitled "The Widows of Action", is available through the website of the Magazine: www.efimerarevista.es; and the following bookshops: Librería La Central in Madrid and Barcelona, Librería Caixa Forum in Madrid and in the Librería Cámara in Bilbao.
The "Espacio Diseminación" - "Dissemination Space" - has been brought forward this year to the month of June and July framed in the context of the exhibition "Escrituras en Libertad" - "Writings in Freedom" - which opened at the Instituto Cervantes in Berlin last June 21st. The program has been curated and organized in collaboration with Andrés Galeano and has been proposed as a temporary route starting from a first generation of artists closely linked to Poetry and Action in the seventies and eighties.
