MAYRIT BIENIAL 2022: THE DROWNED WORLDS

By exploring Madrid’s historical context and framing water as a political subject, the biennial offered a substantial revision of the conventional exhibition format. It addressed the often-avoided question: Is the biennial still a relevant format? Precisely because of its complexity, this question was urgent and necessary. Could such a deeply established model be reimagined to uphold a more responsible and critical position in the moment of ecological and social urgency we inhabit?

Acknowledging the cultural traction and structural entrenchment of the biennial format, MAYRIT proposed to rewrite it from within — offering a contextualized and critical approach grounded in Madrid’s geography and history. A city shaped by cultural layering and historical displacements over centuries, Madrid finds one of its most defining foundations in its hidden underground water system. Making this invisible infrastructure visible provided a key metaphor and operative tool to address a global crisis — water — from a local perspective.

This lens on water policy became a platform for rethinking design practice itself. The complex relationship between water governance and design politics allowed MAYRIT to sketch a new cartography of multidisciplinary, process-based, and fluid practices. It embraced multi-scalarity, networks, and experimental methodologies to respond to today’s environmental, social, and cultural challenges in innovative ways.

MAYRIT 2022 was grounded in six critical Methodologies and their corresponding Practical Proposals, serving as operational frameworks for reshaping the biennial into a structure attuned to contemporary needs:

Through a Diluted Temporality, the program unfolded in phases, allowing for varying intensities of activity and embedding itself within the city’s everyday rhythms. This “diluted calendar” began six months prior to the main exhibition, shifting the temporal peak of the event. The Decentralization of both venues and curatorial focus gave space and voice to narratives, actors, and practices often excluded from mainstream design discourse. The creation of a Decentralized Atlas revalued marginal spaces as generators of new content. Its Network vs. Node model fostered a web of connections, collectives, collaborations, and co-creation. A “fractal structure of relationships between agents” allowed for a horizontal expansion of networks and collective discourse. Recognizing the importance of Processes and Research, MAYRIT promoted a renewed role for design by launching a Digital Research Platform, emphasizing contemporary design as an evolving practice. The event encouraged Transdisciplinarity, facilitating cross-sector knowledge exchange through a List of Alliances — a growing constellation of agents capable of expanding and deepening the design experience.

Finally, MAYRIT promoted New Ecologies of care — extending attention to non-human actors, diverse identities and materials, and the broader impacts of design practices on the invisible systems and ecologies that shape urban life. MAYRIT 2022 invited us to reimagine the behavior and responsibility of the design biennial through the lens of ecological ethics and radical empathy. It positioned itself as a platform from which to transform both the city and the discipline of design across multiple scales. Through its redefined operational frameworks and critical theoretical grounding, MAYRIT addressed urgent relationships between design and ecology, between society and object, between public and private space — and sought to better understand the intertwined local and global challenges that define our time.