Matadero Madrid, a contemporary creation center of the Culture, Tourism, and Sports Area of the City Council of Madrid, presents its summer camp aimed at children aged six to twelve. Titled Construction Camp: Deconstructing the City, this activity aims to reimagine the city from a new perspective, understanding architecture and urbanism as processes to intervene in through play and creativity.
The camp, which will take place from June 23rd to July 11th, is structured into three consecutive weeks. Registrations are independent for each week, allowing participation in one or more. The first week will focus on the city of the past, while the cities of the present and the future will be addressed in the second and third weeks, respectively. Thus, a historical exploration of the city and its transformations will be carried out, tracing the origins of the current metropolis to imagine what it could become in the future.
For this purpose, the activity uses contemporary artistic practices to think and critically interpret the world around us. Throughout the camp, activities will take place in the outdoor green areas as well as in the exhibition and creation spaces of Matadero Madrid. A collective model will be created during the camp, evolving and transforming over the weeks. The constructive and creative learnings will be narrated in community fanzines at the end of each week. Additionally, every Friday, during the last hour of the day, parents can enter the classrooms to see the work done in the previous days.
Week of June 23rd to 27th: The City of the Past
The first week of the camp will revolve around the city of the past, exploring how Madrid was and how it was inhabited in its origins. Participants will delve into different traditional techniques and knowledge from yesterday’s Madrid to create the script for a silent film that will be recorded throughout the week.
As historians and filmmakers, the group will analyze life in cities of the past and try to define what has changed and what remains unchanged, developing the idea of what kind of city they would like to inhabit and why.
Week of June 30th to July 4th: The City of the Present
During the second week, the activity focuses on analyzing the elements that make up the current city. From communication and transportation systems to different neighborhoods and communities, the group will investigate the role these elements play in the city’s structure, explore how different people living in the city relate to each other, and define how collaborative networks are formed among neighbors.
The city analysis will involve understanding why spaces are designed in one way or another, identifying the various urban obstacles that exist for different inhabitants such as the elderly, individuals with special needs, children, animals, and other beings in the urban environment. Based on this analysis, the group will try to answer two key questions: What would happen if we transformed the city to make it more child-friendly? What kind of signals and rules would exist for adults?
Week of July 7th to 11th: The City of the Future
The third week of the camp asks how our city could evolve, exploring what kind of transformations it could undergo and what challenges it will face. After imagining possible scenarios, along with the successes and issues they may entail, the group will develop various methods to communicate with the future inhabitants, creating time capsules and inventing ways to leave hidden messages in the urban context. These practices will prompt reflections on what kinds of fossils we can generate and what they will reveal about us, as well as envisioning sustainable future alternatives.
A project designed and conducted by the Betamind Association
The Betamind Association is comprised of a group of multidisciplinary artists, researchers, psychologists, and educators originating from the Master’s in Art Education in Social and Cultural Institutions at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Complutense University of Madrid. Betamind’s goal is to promote research on creative processes through wonder, discovery, and playful experimentation, generating states of creative flow to obtain different responses in a single artistic action.
The association works around critical pedagogies and the development of projects where art is a transversal tool connecting different areas and creating synergies among them, particularly focusing on the link between science and nature with various artistic disciplines. Among their notable works is the conceptualization, development, and organization of activities for children at the Pedagogical Museum of Children’s Art (MuPAI), projects in collaboration with Espacio Abierto in the summers of 2021 to 2023, the Creating Tribe camp at Matadero Madrid 2024, and workshops with various cultural institutions, art centers, and museums, such as The Divergent Thinking Laboratory, Searching for Snipes: a workshop for families on art and nature, or Pocket Ecosystems, among others. /
Tickets will be available for purchase starting April 30th at mataderomadrid.org
