Esta es una Plaza began as a project in late 2008, driven by the initiative of a group of citizens—mostly residents of the Lavapiés neighborhood—interested in making use of a vacant lot located at 24 Doctor Fourquet Street, which had remained unused for over thirty years.
The project gained momentum following the workshop Interventions in Empty Urban Spaces, organized by the Urbanación collective in collaboration with La Casa Encendida and coordinated by Esterni from Milan. The specific action carried out during the workshop was to propose the transformation of the lot into a green space for alternative leisure and collective enjoyment. This proposal responded to the neighborhood’s needs, identified through a study conducted at the time with local residents. During the brief workshop period, participants intervened in the lot by clearing out accumulated garbage and rubble and outlining some of the areas envisioned in the site's future development.
Thanks to the success of the initiative, the original core group—comprising the workshop’s participants, mostly architects, artists, and biologists—along with other residents who had joined the process and were motivated to give the project greater reach and longevity, began the necessary procedures to obtain the official cession of the land from the Madrid City Council, the site’s owner. The first step was to establish themselves as a Cultural Association under the project’s existing name: Esta es una Plaza. Their goal was to turn this one-time action into a larger initiative, inspired by a desire to experiment with and develop a citizen-led, self-managed process in the spirit of similar initiatives that have emerged in cities around the world in recent decades. One key reference here is the Main Verte program.
The challenge of working together, voluntarily and in a coordinated way, to consolidate a collaborative space open to the public is today a reality. Through a series of interventions and activities over the years, the space has been transformed from a barren lot into a peaceful, green area that offers enjoyment for both children and adults—providing an alternative form of recreation and a space for social gathering and coexistence. The project developed at Esta es una Plaza represents a more human and inclusive way of inhabiting the city, while also being environmentally conscious. It is a living and educational space that has gained recognition and interest from academic and cultural sectors, and that sees itself as a daily event built through self-reflection, participation, and consensus.
1. Esta es una Plaza is the name of the lot where the project is located, the community that has formed around it, and the association that runs it.
2. Main Verte is a program created by the Paris City Council to support the creation of community gardens through formal agreements between participants and the municipality.
3. This movement emerged in the 1960s in New York, thanks to the inclusive and participatory policies of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, and reached its peak during the severe fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
4. These are publicly owned gardens open to anyone who wants to learn gardening.
This exhibition brings together three works that, from different geographies, techniques, and sensibilities, explore the traces left by invisible forms of violence—social, political, and ecological—on the landscape. Far from representing the territory as a neutral setting, these pieces understand it as a traversed body, charged with history, trauma, and resistance.
In Víctor Arroyo’s Disappearance in Three Acts: First Act, the Mexican rural landscape becomes a silent witness to a violent occupation. Through a perspective that dialogues with European pictorial Romanticism, layers of history, pain, and power are superimposed, revealing that forced disappearance and territorial control also operate aesthetically, in what may or may not be shown. In this first act, mourning materializes in images that are simultaneously beautiful and brutal, inscribed in a heartbreaking testimony that guides the viewer toward the almost undetectable: the transformation of the territory into a space of mourning and silence.
Intruders by Jan Locus proposes another form of occupation: the symbolic and environmental colonization of the natural environment. Using archival footage of alleged UFO sightings—now stripped of their mysterious object—Locus offers landscapes where the fantastic, the animal, and the absent converge in a disturbing atmosphere. The unexplained death of animals here becomes an echo of ecological violence, where human intrusion is disguised as myth to hide real deterioration.
Meanwhile, Emma A. Marty’s Action for a Polluted River straddles the threshold between the performative and the documentary, denouncing the silent pollution of the Aulencia River in Spain. Through body and clay, Marty traces a repetitive and dense choreography on concrete, making visible what usually flows unnoticed: the waste of an extractive system seeping into natural channels. Here, the gesture is resistance, and the intervened landscape becomes a living archive of a sustained environmental crisis.
Together, these works map what is typically left out of the frame: structural violence, environmental devastation, and the persistent forms of oblivion. A geography of the invisible, where every image, every gesture, and every silence reveal what persists when it can no longer be seen.
2025 arrives filled with moving images with a new edition of the PROYECTOR Festival: New Hertzog Da Silva Awards and the 3rd Edition of VERTICAL <25
The PROYECTOR platform showcases and distributes the most experimental and cutting-edge proposals from the international scene. The Festival is known for its non-cinemanormative works—pieces that fall outside traditional formats and engage directly with space and the active viewer.
From September 10 to 21, 2025, more than twenty venues across Madrid will intersect to present new languages and formats through around 100 works of expanded cinema, performance, video art, site-specific pieces, interactive installations, and unique premieres presented for the first time at the Festival.
PROYECTOR collaborates with both independent and established spaces, spanning from the city center to surrounding neighborhoods of the capital. These venues are filled with video art proposals curated by the PROYECTOR platform as well as by the galleries and museums that form part of the OFF Circuit.
In its 18th edition, the Hertzog Da Silva Awards return! A total of 6 prizes will be awarded to works selected through the public call by this edition’s jury. Each year, the jury is made up of international professionals specializing in experimental video art. For this edition, the jury includes both artists and curators.
Thanks to Hertzog Da Silva, the VERTICAL <25 call for young creators who embrace verticality will allow the winner to enjoy a production residency in 2026 and the exhibition of their work at the next edition of the PROYECTOR Festival.
PROYECTOR continues to support Madrid’s contemporary scene, collaborating with more than 25 spaces this year and opening doors to artist studios.
The Festival is committed to equality and to the internationalization of a free and accessible culture. That’s why each year, more than half of the selected works are by women artists from up to 30 different countries, and all festival activities are free of charge.
Additionally, all events—including openings, talks, performances, and workshops—will be streamed online (via YouTube and Vimeo) to ensure international accessibility.
The platform collaborates with universities, offering younger generations the opportunity to gain training and integrate into the cultural sector. We are grateful for the support and sponsorship of associations, galleries, foundations, private companies, embassies, venues, and above all, the artists who make it all possible.
Teresa Sapey Collection (Marina Abramović, Haluk Akakce, Jennifer Allora & Guillermo Calzadilla, Eugenio Ampudia, Anthony Goicolea, Tilo Baumgartel, Erick Beltrán, Candice Breitz, Hussein Chalayan, Miguel Chevalier, A. K. Dolven, Leandro Erlich, Jon Mikel Euba, Glenda León, Ruth Gómez Aragón, Dionisio González, Douglas Gordon, Barnaby Hosking, Christian Jankowski, Maria Loboda, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Julian Opie, João Onofre, Tony Oursler, James Paterson, Sergio Prego, Michael Reese, Thiago Rocha Pitta, Charles Sandison, Martín Sastre, Mary Sue, Grazia Toderi, Patrick Tutofoco, Luis Úrculo, Robert Wilson, Wendy Wischer, Jordan Wolfson.)
