Tuesdays-Mondays, 10:00 - 20:00
CentroCentro
press release
CentroCentro is an intercultural meeting space, a large public square for citizens and a setting for participation, action, leisure and learning in Madrid. Located in the emblematic Cibeles Palace, the former Communications Palace, and current headquarters of the Madrid City Council, its objective is to activate critical thinking in the face of the challenges of the present and the future. It is to this space that our exhibition The Visible City / The City at Play will arrive from April 12 to August 25, 2024 (Floor 4). The opening will be on April 11 at 7 p.m., with the presentation of the exhibition and a small catering.
Synopsis
The city is built in many ways. Through material manipulation but also through languages and constructions of symbolic worlds that operate and shape it. Different artefacts and technologies amplify this effect. Our entire relationship with reality is technologically mediated and if there is one technology - and one language - that has become the spearhead of this interaction, it is clearly the video game.
It is possible today to understand the video game as a laboratory for the construction of citizenship, and as a communication language capable of establishing a distance dialogue between the actors who inhabit urban, material and virtual spaces. The interactive nature of digital games and the representation of the city in them encourages the development of a collective intelligence that, in a living way, recursively imagines and writes the present and future of urban spaces.
With this exhibition we propose a look at the video game from its potential to reflect and transform the city, proposing a journey through different interventions, projects and experiments that show how the urban is represented and constructed through this medium.
Video games form a unique relationship between city designs, architecture and urban planning, allowing new ways of understanding the creation of inhabited spaces, physical or virtual. Game environments, and their technologies, can teach us about architecture and the role it plays in society. Virtual worlds allow us to explore and travel through imagined spaces as well as interact and explore existing places from our homes, allowing new ways of relating spatially.
In the two poles of utopian or dystopian future imaginaries, video games are, on the one hand, a tool for the subtle manipulation of our behaviour through playful or gamified dynamics that increasingly mediate the ways of living, travelling and interacting with the city. and its inhabitants and, on the other, spaces from which to experience joint decision-making about our cities so that they are more sustainable, ecological and inclusive.
Through a set of national and international projects that use different compositional and aesthetic techniques, from photography to sculpture through installation and video games, this exhibition proposes an open route articulated in different transversal sections. Presenting different artistic works and recreational interventions, it aims to share with visitors a critical perspective that broadens the vision of the video game beyond a mere object of consumption and pointing to the transformative function of the ludus as a space for collective creation and reflection around the city.
The exhibition has been enriched by the work of artists and thinkers such as Aida Navarro, Mathias Klenner, Sofía Balbontín y Joan Lavandeira, Santiago Bustamante, Fundación Cotec, María Ignacia Ibarra, Gianluca Saporito, Dinosaur Polo Club, Leo Sang, Elise Aubisse, Pablo Garrido Martinez, Outconsumer - Roc Massague, Augustina Isidori, Jose Sanchez, Carlos Padial, Keiichi Matsuda, Mónica Rikić, Dimopoulos, K., Gerber, A., & Götz, U., Navarro Redón, A., Shaw, J., Tan, E., José Tono Martínez, Zemos98, Gira Zapatista and Gall Negre.
The exhibition features the wonderful museography design of Meritxell Ahicart, who has managed to intervene in the center room to recreate a unique experience, the graphic design of Colectivo Buenu and the architectonic design of Paz Artiagoitia and Maximiliano Aguayo.
About ArsGames
Arsgames is an organization based in Barcelona with more than 15 years of experience in artistic creation and social innovation through the use of video games and digital technology. Its co-directors are responsible for the most successful video game exhibitions in the history of Spain: Videojuegos: Los dos lados de la pantalla, curated by Eurídice Cabañes and produced by Fundación Telefónica, which has reached 250,000 visitors in less than three years of activity, and Homo Ludens: videojuegos para entender el presente, curated by Luca Carrubba for Fundación La Caixa, which exceeded 150,000 visitors.
