An artistic platform based in the forests of Madrid
To be honest, creating BOSQUE R.E.A.L. has taken us on quite an adventure. We’ve climbed over fences, scaled towers, interviewed some rather questionable characters, conducted investigations parallel to those of the Civil Guard, reached out to celebrities, sent long voice notes, crossed kilometers of parkland without any moonlight or battery on our phones. But in the end, what we discovered wasn’t a secret. We returned, crossed the Puerta del Rey and left it all behind, the palace, the cathedral, the ordered stone of a capital city, and the people entered and shouted, “The forest pushes towards the city, Madrid flows into the river, crosses the bridge and enters, we’re waiting for you!” There, we lost ourselves among rabbits and trees, amidst History and the stories that were truly waiting for us.
Bosque Real is an artistic platform that revisits the natural dimension of our cities from a contemporary perspective, safeguarding the forgotten heritage and telling it again from multiple new perspectives.
This platform arises with the main goal of disseminating the importance of metropolitan forests and their conservation. This work is carried out through different formats: performances, projections, visits and walks, workshops, meetings, etc., which deal with processes and cultural elements such as History, Landscape, Gastronomy or Ecology.
Its programme is annual and is based on the site-specific concept, in which places and historical events are selected to make specific commissions to artists from different backgrounds and trajectories and to dialogue with the communities that live and work in these places.
The first programme designed by Bosque Real took place in Madrid’s Casa de Campo, a 1,700 hectare historic park located to the west and accessible from the city centre. This programme was R.E.A.L. because it was an Expanded, Augmented and Literal Revision of some of the spaces and stories of the park. During the months of May and June 2019, with the help of several artists, a dialogue took place around a Stonemasonry Warehouse, the discovery of a sea dolphin, the sounds of the War from Cerro Garabitas and the possible images of 1 May 1931, the day on which the King’s Gate finally opened and 300,000 people gained access to a new place. For this reason, and to commemorate that historic moment as an icon of the project, we are once again bringing the more or less forgotten heritage closer to the citizens, giving back to them the spaces that were once private to give them a public utility today.
Bosque Real is, fundamentally, a meeting point. With nature, the city, history, contemporary arts and citizenship. It opens up places that have never been accessible and where we encounter the past from a shared and joyful present.
Since 2019 there have been pieces and interventions by artists such as David Bestué, Patricia Esquivias, Sofía Montenegro, Miriam Martín, BRBR Films, Julio Linares, La Orquesta Sinfónica de Vallecas, bwelkeke (Maral Kekejian, Juanito Jones, Lorenzo García-Andrade and Maria Buey), Adriana Reyes, Carolina Sisabel, Alejandra Pombo Su, VAHO (Paulina Chamorro and Dani Carretero), Institute for Postnatural Studies and with the photographs of Antonio Xoubanova, Bego Solís, Jorge Anguita Mirón, Lourdes Cabrera, Iñaki Domingo, Lucía Antebi, Claudia Claremi, Mónica Valenciano and the collective Real no Real.
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