Madrid Madrid

SubLatino artist collective (Gabriel Peña y Camilo Manco)

In Colombia there is a town named Madrid. In this work we used the distance that separates Madrid (capital of Spain) from the Latin-American Madrid, as a metaphor of a possible approximation of Spain towards Latin-America due to the economic crisis and the massive number of young unemployed people migrating from Spain.

At the exhibition space in Madrid (Spain), there was a table with a digital meter, displaying the distance in kilometers between Madrid and Madrid (8029km). It was connected to an Arduino system and two push buttons indicating north and south. On the wall, a video call in Skype was projected, where people could watch my image in Colombia, in the path between the two Madrid. When the visitors pressed the buttons, they were able to make me walk forward or backward, completing or not the path linking the two continents. Their action also modified the meter values, increasing or decreasing the number of kilometers separating Spain from Latin-America.