New Madrid is a journey through the eight Madrids of the United States. Designed as an audiovisual inventory of each place, the journey started out as a search: the search for utopia. Conceived within the context of a Madrid (Spain) in crisis, the project looked towards its eight namesakes built in the final land to be conquered, the last breeding ground for new societies and communities and which would lead to all manner of utopian and religious experiments: the United States.
The investigative journey would reveal that those eight towns – located in the states of Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York and Maine – were marked by disaster. All had collapsed one way or the other under the economic and financial crises of this century and the previous one. The work is therefore a free reflection on the failed utopia and its copies (are hyperreality and simulation destined to fail?), a text on the endemic problems to which new spaces are condemned and a sketch of a perfect new city that doesn’t allow for copies: a New Madrid.
Natalia Marín
On January 2017, The Wall hosts the screening in loop of the project by Natalia Marín 'New Madrid', an audio visual a journey through the eight Madrids of the United States.