This conversation between artist Irene de Andrés and TBA21 Chief Curator Soledad Gutiérrez discusses the research and process behind La Isla. A través del cauce (The Island. Through the Riverbed, 2023), a video piece that departs from the larger project A orillas del Manzanares, (On the Banks of the Manzanares), as well as a discussion of its former iteration within the Galería Juan Silió in Madrid in the exhibition “Las playas de Madrid” (The Beaches of Madrid), from November 2022 to January 2023.  

Following the Madrilenian Manzanares River as a guiding stream, this conversation exposes the layers of history of the Spanish capital sedimented within the river—from its leisure uses during the Spanish Second Republic in the 1930s, to its frontline transmutation during the Spanish Civil War at the end of that decade, the subsequent physical and cultural repression of of the river in the later part of the twentieth century—as well as the more recent naturalization and recuperation of this ecological and social context.

Access audio file HERE.