MAYRIT Bienal
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
MAYRIT bienal is a platform dedicated to the advancement of contemporary architectural and design practices taking place in the city of Madrid in spring of 2022.
Our multi-venue event aspires to engage with the city’s infrastructural geological and ecological identities. A connected and rooted network of national and european architects and designers becomes the bedrock for a project which aims to consolidate and validate the work of an upcoming generation of experimental creatives.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
MAYRIT Bienal 2022 is a Madrid-based platform that is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of contemporary architectural & design practices. We seek to be decisively rooted in the political-economy and social context of Madrid by engaging and supporting a broad base of partners and participants, tying the program to the urban form and history of the city.
Maǧrīţ, which means “land rich in water,” references the medieval name of the settlement upon which the city of Madrid stands today and from whom she takes her name. The nod to this small Arab enclave suggests a spatiotemporal displacement that, through design, allows for an interrogation of the present ecological and political identity of the Spanish capital. Water acts as a metaphor for our creative fabric, something fragile yet precious.
The project was first launched in 2020 as a design festival, with the goal of supporting the emerging local scene of practitioners. The 2020 edition brought together 12 partnering organizations and +35 architecture and design studios to deliver a program of workshops, conferences, exhibits, and installations.
The success of our 2020 edition taught us about the importance of generating a platform of support for the younger generation of up and coming designers. For 2022 we want to maintain and build upon this promise of fomenting new talents and new methodologies by engaging a vast network of young creatives. We see the potential of having MAYRIT become a referencial platform for this, setting an example of how to be ‘glocal’, interdisciplinary and collaborative.
Our select team of national and international curators will work towards developing exhibitions, public interventions and activities held during the summer months in Madrid. The goals for 2022 lie in generating a new more sustainable urban identity through the creation of cultural networks. We seek to bridge between the institutional and independent along with the the artificial and the natural.
Key objectives for sustainability
We like to think about sustainability as both a means and an end. The team in MAYRIT as well as its collaborating institutions and practitioners tackle sustainability as a way of understanding day by day operations. By this we mean that every decision one makes has a collateral effect upon everything else in the surrounding therefore we try to approach the work and project development in MAYRIT with the consciousness of something worthwhile in the long term. Arriving at a sustainability-based model requires a human investment and MAYRIT is both born and bred from this principle.
As water acts as the metaphor that guides the creative communities that are involved in the project, it also acts as our topic of concern. The theme for the 2022 edition is developed by The Institute of Postnatural Studies, a think tank that acts as a network that brings together artists and researchers concerned about the issues of the global ecological crisis through experimental formats, sharing and producing open knowledge. “Los Mundos Sumergidos” (The Drowned Worlds) theme promotes the understanding of design as a radical practice, to be perceived as a tool for change that speculates on new material ecologies as a commitment towards the future, but above all with the present. The exploration of the fiction of a flooded world, profound implications of time, space and coexistence between species in order to dismantle anthropocentric narratives of design and in turn, open alternative forms of conceiving subjectivity and contemporary aesthetics.
Results of this theme will be seen in the resulting projects, which will display new, more responsible production and material processes. Thus, we aspire to communicate elements of sustainability throughout the process, conceptualization and materialization of MAYRIT.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
MAYRIT is an experience in itself. Experiences are intrinsically aesthetic with particular functional parameters, we thus want to tackle all of the projects that we do as such. The value of MAYRIT lies in the creative communities involved and the people that bring it forth, therefore the experience represents the moment where this all comes together. Even so, design and architecture are both practices that have a strong aesthetic component which cannot be denied. MAYRIT's commitment towards tying together all of its concepts with a high quality and beautiful materialisation. We do not promote empty ,meaningless designs as we are in search for the ‘otherness’ that makes projects special that can help spark emotion in the viewers. Our interest in the application of a speculative design process forces us to always think ahead. This forwardness will be seen through the experiences of the biennial and the city as well as within the projects themselves. Through our theme and involvement of top-notch participants we strive to create a positive and beautiful image of the future to come.
Key objectives for inclusion
We believe that MAYRIT’s capacity for integration is two fold. We work towards MAYRIT becoming a tool for both cultural and social integration. Culturally we aspire to partake in international partnerships in order to bring curators and participants from abroad, not in order to emit a homogenous, globalized message, but one of shared experiences. Socially speaking, we intend to offer MAYRIT’s open, citywide platform in order to share the fascinating world of design with all members of all communities. Our engagement can be found through our various exhibitions, workshops, performances and more.
The MAYRIT platform works towards establishing partnerships with high level institutions and private entities in order to provide new opportunities for participants which would otherwise be ignored or overlooked. In our case, youth is our area of focus. Particularly in Spain, there is an blatant problem found in the creation of opportunities for younger generations to participate in public dialogues, exhibitions etc. MAYRIT intends to act as a bridge for this generally excluded member of the cultural community, as it manages to put these profiles in contact with more mature stakeholders of the sector. This applies a process of inclusion with a very clear impact in mind, which is to further the development of the cultural industry.
Innovative character
Few times have biennials been born from a real, palpable socio-cultural movement. Many times cultural events exist in order to economically or politically capitalize on something that was taken from elsewhere. In the case of MAYRIT, the ones that are organizing the event are also part of the movement and scene themselves. This is where the project began and is the reason for the first edition's success. As we enter the stage of launching the biennial, we strive to ask ourselves other questions such as: what is the pertinence of a design biennial within contemporary design? This next edition thus seeks to design and implement an operating model in order to drive multi-level change in the way culture is experienced and produced. The challenges that we have placed upon ourselves provide a strong goal-based framework in order to tackle, through design, the urgent issues of sustainability, urban development and socio-cultural restructuring. The MAYRIT bienal places its efforts in challenging the tendency towards single-discipline categorization by employing a transcalar lens, thus invigorating a horizontal discourse between many fields of practice. Bringing these disciplines into an explicit relationship to one another creates new ‘thinking spaces’ with which we can project our projects and experiences for the future. This approach towards design unfolds new ways of tackling design practices that dilute the binary boundaries between creative disciplines, allowing us to speak of fluid social and professional relationships. Thus, as water not only sustains our own body, it can connect us with other bodies and other scales. MAYRIT seeks to develop a new type of design from which to promote a practice that is aligned with contemporaneity. As a relatively new approach to the discipline, speculative design can provide an open set of tools, techniques and methods. This ecosystem of closely connected practices implement speculation and fiction a motor for change.
