'UnderLOOP' is a video art exhibition that proposes the re-opening of the old Cine Avenida de la Luz to promote contemporary artists.
The event breathes new life into the emblematic cinema at the underground of Pelayo Street, which was part of the post Civil War urban project “Avenida de la Luz”: a passage below ground that started hosting household goods shops and transformed into a meeting point for countercultural leisure during the transition to democracy. Also known as “the laughter palace” for its initial programme of Disney films, the children’s pictures theatre transitioned into a porn cinema and ended up closing its doors with the Barcelona Olympics.
UnderLOOP brings back the old cinema to contemporary culture by giving visibility to a series of artists that work temporary or permanently at a local level, but outside the main commercial or institutional fabric of the city. In dialogue with the space, the selected works mark the importance of site-specificity and the development of landscapes and territories through the binary ‘individual-environment’ or ‘collective-environment’.