Matadero Madrid

Matadero Madrid is a former slaughterhouse in the Arganzuela district of Madrid, which has been converted to an arts centre. Matadero Madrid is a lively, constantly changing space at the service of creative processes, participatory artistic training and dialogue between the arts. It was set up to help reflect on the contemporary sociocultural environment and support processes to build the culture of today and tomorrow. A unique lab for experimentation and promoting new cross-disciplinary formulae.

On 21 June 1911, construction began on the slaughterhouse (“matadero”) and livestock market, one of the most singular industrial establishments of 20th-century Madrid architecture. The project by Luis Bellido was structured around a complex of pavilions characterised by functionality, constructive rationality and conceptual simplicity. There is however a historicist element to the architecture, which incorporates Neo-Mudéjar features, such as tiles with abstract designs.

The buildings were in use as a slaughterhouse until 1996. At the turn of the 21st century, Madrid City Council decided to turn this space into a great laboratory for contemporary artistic creation. In keeping with its experimental vocation, all the restoration work has been developed through a newly added, flexible and reversible architecture that uses industrial materials that go with the premises’ character. Thus, Matadero has become an opportunity to experiment with Madrid’s new architecture.

Matadero Madrid is a project promoted by Madrid City Council’s Department of the Arts and managed by the Directorate General for Cultural Projects through Matadero Madrid’s coordination team, in collaboration with other public and private organisations.

Matadero Madrid has taken up the challenge of combining restoration work with cultural activity and public access in a commitment to involving the public in its development. This commitment has been maintained and expanded, while always hewing to the main lines of the project, including artistic production and experimentation, dissemination and exhibition and training and research. Matadero Madrid undertakes this work with the utmost respect for the inherited industrial legacy and with its attention focused on the surrounding neighbourhoods and the city of Madrid without losing sight of the international scene. The stimulus of contemporary artistic creation is an essential part of Matadero Madrid’s mission, and this always comes with a multi-disciplinary, hybridised and groundbreaking perspective which leaves room for all forms of artistic expression: the visual arts, reading and literature, the performing arts, film, music, design, architecture, urban planning and landscaping. From this point of view, the involvement of the city’s main agents and institutions that work in various fields of cultural creation has been, and continues to be, fundamental. This commitment has helped us to create a model of institutional, public and private cooperation that facilitates society’s participation in the project and guarantees the project’s plurality, independence and viability.

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