Los Rótulos de Paco Graco
26 Apr 23 - 31 Mar 24
This instalment of the series Los Rótulos. Lavapiés, Patrimonio Común de Gráfica Comercial de Lavapiés-Embajadores by the Madrid-based collective Paco Graco presents a present, past and future ethnography of the communities that make up the life of the Lavapiés and Embajadores neighbourhoods through their contribution to the neighbourhood’s shared urban landscape.
By reclaiming shop signs and recontextualising them here as an imagined typographic landscape, Paco Graco proposes an exercise in critical memory that invites us to understand the effects of displacement and gentrification, but also the sense of community and solidarity that characterise the unique neighbourhoods surrounding La Casa Encendida.
Throughout the year, the 35 restored shop signs will be illuminated on part of the façade and in the communal spaces of La Casa Encendida.
Paco Graco is a project dedicated to the defence and protection of a shared heritage of Madrid that has been seriously threatened by globalisation in recent decades: the city’s commercial graphic heritage, a witness to the history of this city and its residents. The collective aims to protect and preserve examples of shop signs in Madrid, which have been dismantled and demolished on a massive scale in recent years.
Paco Graco comprises: Mercedes Moral, Guillermo Borreguero, Jacobo Cayetano, Alberto Nanclares and Zuloark.
With the support of the 2022/2023 Grants for Contemporary Creation and National and International Mobility.