Glenda León – Every breath

31.01 – 26.04/2015
Nave 16, Madrid

Matadero Madrid presents Cada Respiro (Every Breath), a large audiovisual video installation by Glenda León, a Cuban artist known as one of the most relevant figures of her generation. Curated by Christian Domínguez, the five screens that comprise Cada Respiro gather images of the earth, the sky, fire, and the sea, moving at the pace of breathing, an act repeated time and again that is a sign of life, along with the beating of the heart, and a bridge between the world and the body, since every time we inhale we take something from the world, and every time we exhale we return something. In that motion, the artist seeks not only to give an idea of the connectedness between people and the world they inhabit, but also the potential all human beings carry to transform the world, which is not as far as we sometimes think, and so provide a dose of optimism. This is a project by Glenda León for Gran Escala, a programming line at Matadero Madrid that investigates the relationship between the world of art and its volume in space. According to Christian Domínguez, “the narrative presented in Cada Respiro warns us of an excessively materialistic world orbited by egocentrism. At the same time, it seeks to give balance and spiritual coherence to an existence, ours, that in a practically incomprehensible way has fallen into the absurd practice of ignoring its own harmonious quality. At a minimum, the fact that the vanity of our dominant global culture has reached the conclusion that the universe as a whole is structured into reductionist divisions, merits analysis.”