IT

Launched by Fundación Montemadrid in 2002, La Casa Encendida has redefined the integration of culture, social commitment, and inclusivity strategies. Through open calls and cross-disciplinary initiatives, the institution attracts and engages diverse audiences each year, helping to inform, educate, and strengthen Madrid’s social fabric. This interview was conducted with Pablo Berástegui, current director of La Casa Encendida.

Within the landscape of European cultural institutions, Madrid’s La Casa Encendida stands as an experiment of remarkably forward-looking efficacy. Founded in 2002 under the aegis of Fundación Montemadrid, its structure anticipated by twenty years the cross-disciplinary approach that many organizations now strive to catch up with: a model where contemporary art dialogues without hierarchies with environmental sustainability, music, education, and inclusive commitment—in this case, rooted in the Lavapiés neighborhood. Far from acting as a mere venue or an ivory tower, the cultural center operates as a living organism in constant transformation. Through long-term programs like Verbos Encendidos, festivals dedicated to youth creativity such as Puwerty and Inéditos, and an unwavering focus on accessibility, La Casa Encendida reflects the tensions, shifts, and complexity of contemporary Madrid.
In this conversation, director Pablo Berastégui guides us behind the scenes of the institution’s curatorial machinery: from the delicate balance between artistic autonomy and institutional mandate, to the challenges of managing a twenty-year archive, and down to the strategies ensuring that inclusion remains more than just a slogan, transforming it into a genuine tool for encounter and collective cross-pollination.

THE INTERVIEW WITH PABLO BERASTÉGUI

La Casa Encendida is supported by the Fundación Montemadrid. How is your curatorial autonomy developed and negotiated within this institutional framework?  
We work with complete artistic freedom, providing our programming remains aligned with the mission and values of Fundación Montemadrid. This autonomy is possible in a close dialogue with the Foundation’s strategic priorities and within the logical budget constraints. 

Alongside exhibitions, La Casa Encendida develops an extensive public program. What strategies do you adopt to ensure that these initiatives build a genuinely open community, rather than becoming a space that speaks only to its already existing audience?  
This is a very challenging issue. We don’t work for a single audience, but rather a wide range of different audiences. Our cultural activities attract certain publics, while our social and environmental programmes tend to attract different ones. The same applies to educational and social resources that La Casa Encendida provides, from Spanish lessons for migrants, to the free use of our libraries or work spaces, or the use of our new 0-3 years old facility. But even the publics of our cultural activities, can’t be reduce to a unique profile. Having said that, it’s true that some of our most renown programs are appreciated mostly for an urban, contemporary, young-adult audience. It’s also true that both Fundación Montemadrid and La Casa Encendida we are committed to make our programs accessible to an even wider range of publics, with a special commitment to reach younger audiences. In  order to reach this, we are implementing a three-layer strategy: first, to ensure the core activities of our program are more inclusive ‒ through pricing policies, providing resources for  people with special needs, mediation ‒becoming inclusive as our resources allow us to be; secondly, to reach people that were not yet interested in our activities by designing specific project for specific audiences that we want to target (i.e. teenagers); and thirdly, to imagine ways as how to mix-up the different audiences that we can reach, in order to promote a positive contamination among practices and a better understanding of the complexity of our  society and tastes and desires. To become a true place for encounter the other. 

LA CASA ENCENDIDA: PROGRAMMES AND GOALS

Since its opening in 2002, La Casa Encendida has developed a programme that brings together contemporary art, education, music, environmental concerns, and social practices. How would you define the institution’s identity today within Madrid’s cultural ecosystem? 
When La Casa Encendida was founded this sort of transversal approach was not as common as it is today. In that sense, the institution was quite pioneering. Nowadays, more art institutions are expressing their environmental concerns and social commitment through their exhibition and public programs. In our case, this approach has been part of our DNA since the very beginning. Our role is not simply to raise awareness through our exhibitions and activities, as many, but to gradually transform the way we work so that we can become an active agent for change ourselves. We are doing this by working together with artists, universities, and other foundations to produce knowledge around key issues related to the social and environmental challenges. We want this knowledge to be shared beyond the institution and, in some cases, to contribute to advocating for and implementing solutions that emerge from these collective processes. 

Your programme spans exhibitions, festivals, music, educational activities, and social projects, generating a highly heterogeneous and layered cultural output over time. In this context, the archive can become a central tool not only for preservation but also for constructing institutional memory. What role does the archive play for you? Do you see it primarily as a linear narrative, or as a device capable of revealing fractures, shifts, and transformations in your history? 
After 23 years of producing activities and exhibition at a very high rate, there is a gigantic archive of digital, and physical outputs related to these projects. During the pandemic, we launched La Casa ON where a selection of the digital resources amassed during these years. Although it is still available, the return to the on-site activities let this side of our project in stand-by, although it is constantly updated with new contents. However, we still need to confront and develop a clear strategy around our archive, focusing on the digital. This is something that should be done in the following years.

Madrid is a city shaped by significant social, cultural, and political transformations. Have there been curatorial decisions that would have been unthinkable in a different urban context?  
All curatorial decisions reflect the context in which are taken. As you mentioned, the demography, wealth and priorities of the city have changed enormously since the turning of the century. Madrid has become a global city, with a richer and more diverse ecosystem of artists, galleries, independent agents, audiences, and attention. Not considering this new context when thinking about our programs wouldn’t be a good idea. In parallel, since the birth of La Casa Encendida, new and outstanding art institutions have appeared in, enriching and enlarging the city’s artistic and cultural environment.  Consequently, from a curatorial perspective, again it would make no sense to work as if these new institutions were not existing. In that sense, our curatorial approach seeks to focus on our own specific areas of interest, complementing the spaces and programmes that are not being sufficiently addressed elsewhere by other entities operating in the city; and collaborating with other institutions when we share a genuine interest in areas/artists/programs that we consider are core to our mission. Madrid, as any other city, is also affected by global events, authoritarian trends, disruptive technologies, loss of faith in collective knowledge, that we are experiencing globally. For an institution that aspires to confront the challenges of the present, it would be also unthinkable not to address those issues in our curatorial approach. 

LA CASA ENCENDIDA’S PROJECTS

Opening a permanent channel for project submissions inevitably creates expectations among artists and curators. How do you manage this dynamic, and what kind of dialogue do you establish with those who choose to submit proposals?
Indeed, promoting a variety of open calls as to open-up our programs to people we didn’t know beforehand is not always easy, nor the only desirable way of working. For us this strategy makes sense as “promoting access” is one of our drivers, it might not be the case for other organizations.  In order to address the downsides of this kind of approach, we try to manage this by improving and simplifying the calls themselves, by making them transparent and fair, by inviting external experts to evaluate the proposals and choose together with us the best candidates for each call. However, there is room for improvement in the way we communicate with and support those who are not selected.  

Your activity unfolds through relatively short programming cycles, yet at the same time builds a history spanning more than twenty years. How do you maintain curatorial continuity over time within such a dynamic framework?  
As you spotted, this was the way we tended to work. However, at this very moment, we are trying to combine this short programming cycles with other time-extended ones. On one hand, we are maintaining some of the festivals and programs concentrated in time and space, that punctuates our yearly program, revisiting them, sometimes expanding them, making them grow, and turning them as milestones of our fix programming structure. We call the imperdibles; the not-to-be-missed programs. From a curatorial perspective, when approaching these Imperdibles, we invite external curators or artistic directors to run then for a minimum of 3 years, given them a clear framework, with objectives and goals we are pursuing, as to ensure they can have enough time to make a mark, without compromising the sense those programs have for us. On the other hand, we are arranging the other short programs around a global idea that changes every year. As a general theme. Thus, we launched an overall project called Verbos Encendidos (Enlightened Verbs), built around a simple yet powerful idea: each year, we choose a verb that expresses a form of collective action that we believe is particularly urgent to bring into our societies. This verb then becomes a guiding thread for our team, shaping our programming and encouraging us to explore how it can be put into practice across our different fields of action. Rather than choosing the verbs ourselves, we invited the users of our spaces and programmes to propose them, allowing their concerns, aspirations, and experiences to help shape the project. For the first edition, the verb we set was Escuchar (To Listen), and the second Enlightened Verb was chosen by the visitors and participants of our activities, Comprender (To Comprehend), which articulates a large amount of our activities of this year’s program. In this way, Enlightened Verbs is progressively becoming not only a curatorial framework for our team, but also a collective exercise as how to address some of the most urgent challenges of the time in which we are living in. As I mentioned before, we are doing this together with offering larger tranches of time to other projects in several areas, inviting artists and collectives to two-year research residencies to be carried inside our organization, not necessarily in a physical way, and incorporating their outputs in our yearly program.

Many cultural processes today take place through digital platforms, like open calls, online archives, communication, and audience engagement. How do you ensure that access to your activities does not reproduce inequalities related to uneven digital skills and access?  
We need to make a deep reflection as how to proceed with our digital project. In a way, we feel our digital project should become the main one and the physical space, its interface. It is still too soon as to know how we can proceed but we are aware of the kind of inequalities you mentioned. As other institutions, we are aware not everyone interested in our programs have the same capabilities. As an example, when we launched an open call for ideas to be developed in a citizenship laboratory, which we wanted to be address to the different communities surrounding our main building at Lavapiés neighborhood (a place with a very rich mix of cultures, classes, origins), we launched the open-call in 4 languages (Spanish, English, Chinese, and Arabic) and organized events for people that needed help with the digital application. We are far from being able to provide this kind of support for all our open calls. But, yes, we are very aware of the complexity it entitles. Again, this is something that we should be addressing very soon.

Your programme also includes open calls for curators, such as Electrónica en el Club. What role do these initiatives play within your curatorial model and in your relationship with new generations of cultural practitioners? 
In the example you mentioned, the idea of launching an open call was included in the proposal that gained the support of the Creative Europe program in which we participate (lead by Onassis Stegi in Athens, in collaboration with Club to Club in Torino, Kiosk Radio in Brussels and Arty Farty in Lyon). The idea was to give people from underrepresented communities greater visibility. This is an ongoing project that was very successful in its first year. We are very much committed about allowing access to younger generations to spaces of responsibility and visibility. One of our most important projects is called Inéditos and is addressed to young curators, under 35, Spanish born or residents in Spain, to produce an exhibition, with all the means, accompaniment and support that we compromise when working with an external curator. During the 22 years of existence of this open call, many of the curators carrying responsibility positions in Spain’s art landscape were given the opportunity to produce their first institutional exhibition on the frame of this program. There are other examples of this strategy that we are carrying out to promote fresh, new voices into our art ecosystem for instance, Puwerty, a multidisciplinary festival of young creation, dedicated to amplifying the voices, ideas and artistic practices of creators under 26.

Leonardo Piazza
La Casa Encendida
Ronda de Valencia 2, Madrid (Lavapiés District)
https://www.lacasaencendida.es