Something’s Going on Around Redor

Madrid, 1969. Tino Calabuig (Colmenar de Oreja, Madrid, 1939) and Alberto Corazón (Madrid, 1942–2021) rent a basement on Villalar Street where they set up a screen-printing workshop. Two years later, the space is activated as a gallery, with Calabuig as the main person in charge and managed by Rosalind Williams (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA, 1943). The transition between both uses was immediate, as the workshop also produced posters for the exhibitions and events held there. This exhibition brings together some of the artistic and activist initiatives that took place there to claim the right to the city. In a context restricted by the 1959 Public Order Act, the Redor gallery became a place from which to articulate a class culture that was barely possible in the streets and squares.

The exhibition proposes a review of the projects produced at Redor focused on the urban environment and the worker, understood as speculative tools that imagine a democratic city where the private and the local, the public and the global, are linked like gears. The tour takes as its starting point the project Architecture Exhibition (1972), by Tanis Pérez Pita, Daniel Zarza, and Rafael Zarza, which aims to denounce the appalling living conditions of housing. This demand is extended in the documentary The City is Ours (Urban Aesthetics) (1975) by Calabuig himself, featuring several neighborhood associations from the outskirts of Madrid. In the move from home to the street, the exhibition traces a labyrinthine design and recovers An Everyday Journey (1971), an installation in which Calabuig shakes up the monotonous daily commute of the worker to work through the event: “something happens”. The oppressive ecology of the city resonates in exhibitions such as Graphic Image of the African American Movement (1972), which highlights Redor’s commitment to the fundamental rights of women and racial and ethnic minorities, specifically through the importance they place on the structuring and social segregation of the urban environment.

Fifty years after the end of the dictatorship, the materials presented here express concerns that dialogue with ongoing civic struggles, such as the right to housing and the public use of space, in an attempt to recognize the encounter between two temporalities.