Últimas ocho horas de Cordero Social: An Audiovisual Art Exhibition by Álvaro Perdices

This audiovisual artwork by Álvaro Perdices, presented within the 'Luz y Sombra. Goya y el realismo español' exhibition, uses a live stream from Madrid's San Antón church to create a simultaneous link between urban life and the museum context. It documents daily acts of care and community within the church, reinterpreting the sacred through social communion.

Últimas ocho horas de Cordero Social is an audiovisual artwork by Álvaro Perdices conceived within the framework of the exhibition 'Luz y Sombra. Goya y el realismo español'. The piece is structured around a continuous live broadcast that transmitted events from the vicinity of Francisco de Goya's painting 'La última comunión de San José de Calasanz', located in the Church of San Antón in Madrid, to the exhibition space. This setup created a temporal and symbolic link between the two contexts, embedding an urban experience within an international museum setting. Analogous to Goya's depiction of San José de Calasanz receiving extreme unction, the Church of San Antón daily hosts a contemporary form of communion through the hospitality and care provided by Mensajeros de la Paz to vulnerable individuals. The broadcast captured the final eight hours of this connection, forming an audiovisual archive documenting gestures, rituals, and situations structuring daily life in this hybrid space. The work presents these images as an open sequence, where duration and repetition hold significance, allowing viewers to find knowledge in the seemingly incidental. These recordings highlight a ritualistic emergence rooted in the tangible and immediate, where daily practices like eating, resting, and conversing gain a symbolic dimension that reformulates the liturgical. The religious building is thus recontextualized as a site of social communion, where shared experience replaces transcendence as the organizing principle. The artwork registers these processes without hierarchy or dramatic emphasis, proposing a perspective that centers the ordinary, underscoring the political and affective dimensions of these encounters. Within the exhibition, this 'church of the earthly' is symbolically reinscribed in the Capilla del Colegio de San Gregorio, part of the Museum's collection. This displacement not only relocates the San Antón space within a heritage context but also prompts reflection on how the living, the social, and the contingent can be accommodated, represented, and reinterpreted by the museum institution, thereby tensioning the boundaries between document and exhibition, experience and representation.

The exhibition 'Últimas ocho horas de Cordero Social' is presented in the Capilla del Colegio de San Gregorio. Admission is free. It is open Tuesday to Saturday, from 10:00 to 14:00 and 16:00 to 19:30, and Sundays and holidays from 10:00 to 14:00.