With the Community of Madrid still in phase 0 of the de-escalation process, the cultural offer continues to adapt to circumstances, without concerts or celebrations for San Isidro 2020. The Reina Sofía Museum collects on a website the part of its digital collection that can be admired with the new gigapixel technology, Medialab Prado imagines what the ideal house is like in confinement and the Press Palace exhibits illustrations in the form of a comic book cover asking tribute to health workers, firefighters and other professionals who are fighting this crisis.
ILLUSTRATION. Comic book covers to remember the heroes against the coronavirus
Despite keeping the streets almost empty during these last weeks, the exterior screens of the Palacio de la Prensa in Callao have been kept on and very active. For weeks, they have projected applause at eight in the afternoon and launched the initiative Capeless heroes, in which the people in charge of the room collected images of people working to fight the coronavirus. Now, they turn to illustration to pay tribute to the groups of essential professionals who take the city forward on a daily basis. As if they were comic book covers, It’s time for superheroes it exhibits one every day, dedicated to the sanitary or the firemen; to carriers, postmen or supermarket cashiers. About fifteen new artists, such as Esperanza Sáez and Isa Muguruza, have created and donated these illustrations, compiled by the Wash bookstore with texts by Álvaro Palma. For those who cannot approach the Gran Vía, they can also be seen as a virtual exhibition in the social networks of the Press Palace and on the website of the Department of Youth of Alcalá de Henares.
ART. What the human eye cannot see in the pictures of Reina Sofía
The Reina Sofía Museum has spent years developing gigapixel photography technology for its digital content. With it, it allows the viewer to analyze details of the paintings that we could not perceive with the limitations of the human eye from the safety distance that a face-to-face visit to the art gallery usually imposes on us. Now, you have opened the space on your website Gigapixel, a section that compiles this previous work. Using this ultra-HD technology it is possible to examine works from your digital collection with a high level of precision. Some of the works that can already be explored are Femme à la guitare (Woman with a Guitar), 1917, by María Blanchard; Cubist self-portrait, 1923, by Salvador Dalí; Femme, oiseau, étoile -Homenatge to Pablo Picasso- (Woman, Bird and Star – Homage to Picasso-), 1966-1973, by Joan Miró; Guernica, 1937, by Pablo Picasso; A world, 1929, by Ángeles Santos; and The Café gathering de Pombo, 1920, by José Solana.
WORKSHOP. A common house for a new reality
These weeks of confinement have also been time for reflection. It has also been for MediaLab Prado, a cultural center located in the Plaza de las Letras, dedicated to the city and urban life. Its managers have started to imagine a common house made of anyone’s houses. In the #FuturoCompartido project, they invite people from Madrid to eat a pencil, colored markers or a pen, and draw their house from above. And then send the resulting image with the distribution of the space in which they are spending much of their time in this confinement season. With all the proposals they collect, they will create a common space in which the neighbors can continue to meet despite the isolation and with which to think about a new normality or a future different from the one we had hoped for until now. This proposal is for MediaLab Prado a way of “remembering and celebrating the importance of the public, the common, care and the ability to imagine, today more than ever, a future in which we want to live.” The proposals can be sent to the email [email protected] or in a WhatsApp or Telegram message to the phone: 639733900. They can also be seen on social networks, accompanied by the hashtags #Hagamoscasa and #Futurocompartido and on the website of Grigri Projects, one of the promoters of the initiative.
MUSEUMS. The jewels of Madrid’s municipal museums
Until they can reopen their doors, the Network of Municipal Museums of Madrid bring their collections closer through virtual visits, which can continue by accessing the channel that the digital space Memoria de Madrid have on YouTube. The curators of the museums themselves act as guides, explaining to the viewer the heritage that their walls contain. The first of the recordings focuses on the office of the writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna, one of the pieces that make up the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art on Conde Duque Street. The space speaks of the absent character and the creative environment in which he lived. The historical and cultural heritage of Madrid, from Roman Hispania to the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century, is thus compiled on the video platform.
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