FRESH MADRID EXHIBITION / Creative, Art Direction and Design
An exhibition of photographs exploring Madrid’s young architecture scene, Fresh Madrid was a photographic recording of events spanning over the months Manuel followed the day by day of each office and individual collecting the journeys of their work, thinking process, difficulties and joys.
For Fresh Madrid, Manuel followed designed the exhibition developing the content with daily photograph documentation, video projections and samples of publications. The exhibition of small-scale photographs explores memory, loss, work, day by day and the moments of wonder that can be found in any young architecture office around the world.
The idea for the exhibition came after detecting a new attitude, a new way of positioning itself before the architecture project, its problematic and the limits of the disciplinary discourse on the part of professionals trained in the Technical School of Architecture of Madrid between the end of years 90 and principles 2000, and which does not address cultural, geographical or thematic prejudices.
The idea was to create a big collection of stamps/images of young architects’s thinking in progress. Their personal character and interventions piece together a sometimes serious, sometimes funny and always intense flow of work from those who change the direction of our urban environments. The edition of content for Fresh Madrid did not respond to the idea of recognition established in the architecture world, but to the observation of a risky and purposeful behavior on the part of these young people.
The exhibition showed the novelty in the posture of this group clearly identified in the incorporation to its repertoire of projective tools that come from sociology, politics, anthropology, biology, economics, ecology and that broaden and reinforce the concept of multidisciplinarity in a new way, offering a space for those who transit the hybrid universe between architecture and contemporary art, free of ideological or formal preconceptions.
The star architect leaves his site to the architect in the street, next to his client, closer to society, researcher and experimental. It is fundamental to understand the concept of Fresh Madrid as something decontaminated from the preexistence of definitions of how an exhibition or an architecture publication should be. Manuel wanted to show the interaction strategies of this young professionals with the objective of encouraging solidarity creation and supporting the production of new works and projects through new formats of relationship.
A catalogue of exhibition as a diary of images that reveal hidden moments, ideas and suggestions about everyday architecture thinking at a time when the city of Madrid was looking across global borders with mixed emotions. Manuel’s images and exhibition design wanted to take everyone on a meditative global tour, pausing and reflecting on the details on the life of those young architects who will create the texture of city streets.