Escaparates alternativos

Artwork by María Ruiz
Fine Arts UCM Aranjuez, course 2010-11

In a very commercial area in the centre of Madrid, the artist finds ignored, enclosed spaces at ground level – cellar windows, abandoned shop entrances – where rubbish accumulates. This series of photographs depicts these spaces as caricatures of shop windows, with bars in place of glass, in which products that were once lined up on shop shelves are found randomly scattered, accumulating dirt, once the brief useful segment of their lifespan has passed.

The images are located and linked together by means of a map (link) – an alternative guide to the commercial life of the city, to a network of exceptionally long-lived pieces of uncommissioned public art, ever-evolving through the input of countless passers-by.