Everything Else

ince the seventies, Madrid’s spaces for visual arts have brought cultural activities to the capital and its citizens on a regular basis. Despite the local context being heavily influenced by public cultural institutions, independent spaces have enriched the cultural scene of the city with autonomy and diversity. Today around forty of such centres are open to the public in Madrid, hosting exhibitions, conferences, workshops, artistic residencies, catering services, and a wide range of other events, fostering a lasting relationship with its visitors.

Everything Else emerged when CentroCentro invited four of these spaces to work as a curatorial collective with the aim of shedding light on hybrid organisations. This close-up presents twenty very different spaces. Their approaches are what art historian and educator Manuel Bartolomé Cossío called “everything else”, in reference to the union of knowledge and experiences of a non-academic nature essential to a person’s education.

If art and culture can be understood as an expansive field of knowledge, nourished by a myriad of diverse elements, spaces for contemporary culture offer us “everything” we cannot get from public or commercial institutions. Experimental artistic proposals that take risks and are born from intuition; places for shared learning, where the focus is on the process rather than the results; non-hierarchical working models, with horizontal, inclusive teams that promote equality and solidarity; engaged cultural practices that respond to the problems of the context in which they are created, that promote hospitality and the fostering of long-lasting relationships and, above all, that are able to sustainan affective like-minded community around their activity.

The public programme delivered alongside the exhibition will include around thirty activities, such as workshops, screenings, live performances and music shows, all linked to the processes of creation and research at each of the spaces taking part.
The complete programme will be published online shortly.