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.
Project description by Diego Delas
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.
