Madrid Art Week 2026 has left an adrenaline hangover that seems to have been gradually digested. This year, the date was ambitious, to say the least. In addition to the five art fairs held simultaneously, we must add countless gallery openings, the new design fair, and innumerable events and gatherings. The result: exposure, outreach, new fronts, and sales.
Navigating these days is not an easy task for anyone in the sector or passionate about art. An endless stream of emotions arises with each encounter, and the work that manages to provoke and join any collection seems to have reached the finish line.
For 2026, the Art Madrid fair continued its parallel program outside the reflective white walls. Under the direction of Yudinela Ortega, the performance cycle achieved its goal of becoming a platform for meeting and visibility. Titled Infinite Openness, what the body remembers, the program expanded along the central aisle without spatial limitations or demarcations on the granite floor. The four performative encounters that comprised the cycle openly lent themselves to the unexpected unfolding of the fair, integrating and unsettling in equal measure. There, Trajectory pulsed: Amanda Gatti's proposal as a multidisciplinary artist that cradled, more than a performance, the wake of an entity needing closure.
Trajectory – a body and its support
Thirty kilograms of objects tied with a rope. Remains discovered over months in the streets—to which Amanda has given recognition, care, and transformation by painting them blue—became the weight of her stride in Trajectory. The artist traversed the central aisle, dragging the load of objects tied by a single blue cord with her ankles. You could perfectly recognize each of these items, yet their most distinctive feature was the result of a blue mass.
The dragging of this monochrome mass, solely by the force of human effort, roared as if it were a warning. At times, silence fell, and with it, emptiness, and with it, only the blue and a body in motion remained. The need to approach, observe, identify, stop, and move forward generated a dialogue of integration between the material and immaterial, density and fragility, the ephemeral and enduring.
How much does the past weigh on our present? How much can we continue to sustain? What from all that we were and lived do we need to keep so as not to lose ourselves? There is no exact measure to answer any of these questions, and the answer becomes a volatile body.
This uncertainty materialized in the tension of the ropes extending from Gatti's shoes. Pushing, tensing, and pulling ceased to be mechanical verbs, becoming the only real measure of the weight we carry and the places we have occupied. They were vital threads holding the burden of these questions that arose from watching the artist rub the floor of the public space with objects stripped of their utility and extracted from it; an action that managed to activate and imbue new meaning into a corridor that, minutes before, remained neutralized in its purely functional aspect.
Moving implies both abandonment and attachment, as the tension of the ropes was not merely physical; it was the echo of a constant negotiation between the weight of the objects and the will of the body. In that drag, every inch advanced felt like resistance against the oblivion of what is no longer useful. It was eleven minutes of suspense, just enough to contemplate how the weight was surrendered to public view, like someone opening up from the depths of their being before the gaze of strangers. In that journey, spectator identification was inevitable: we all carry remnants of a trajectory that both hinders and defines us. In the roar of those objects against the floor, we recognized our own burdens. It became evident that this separation is never fully completed as long as the body — and memory — continue to move.
In Amanda’s action, there is an unfinished separation from objects and the sense of belonging, reoriented towards a "blue destiny" that, like the end of the aisle, always seems to shift a little further.
Blue functions as a refuge, and sometimes, encountering a color means encountering oneself, identifying oneself amidst the tumult of society, the fast pace, and discarded objects. In the end, that blue roar against the floor dissolved for many of us present into the only way to recognize our own existence in the middle of the fair; to make our loneliness visible among the audience and memory.
In Blue Revealed, Amanda wrote for CACO about a temporary state: “Currently, I am blue. I’m blue.” This confession is annexed to Trajectory as the symptom of a journey that becomes present through the trace on Art Madrid’s granite, functioning as a conduit to understand life as a migrant in relation to the world. It is, ultimately, the trace of a gesture that stops to say: "I am here, and this is what I leave of myself."
Credits:
Performance Trajectory, by Amanda Gatti. Art Madrid, 2026. Cibeles Palace, Madrid
Photography by Pedro Méndes
