Spanish artist Gonzalo Borondo, from Valladolid, arrives at LuzMadrid Festival with Redentora, a site-specific installation that continues his steady movement from the street into more complex, immersive environments. Early on, Borondo was working directly on walls, glass, and found surfaces—scratching, layering, and revealing figures that appear to surface from within the material itself. That sensitivity to place and surface has stayed with him – and expanded. Whether in abandoned buildings, museum settings, or public squares, his eyes read the space and lets the work grow out of it.

Here, in the Glorieta de San Víctor in Madrid’s Pico del Pañuelo neighborhood, context is specific; and it carries weight. The housing was built in 1927 for workers in the city’s former slaughterhouse, and he engages with that history. For Redentora, Borondo builds a large-scale zoetrope—a rotating, pre-cinematic device that produces the illusion of movement—and places it within a domed structure that visitors can enter. Developed in concert with a soundscape by El Niño de Elche, the installation turns on repetition, rhythm, and physical presence. It links the square, the mechanism, and the memory embedded in the site.

Borondo describes it without embellishment: “a kind of automated, mechanical ritual… that plays with the dimension between the sacred and the idea of sacrifice… and at the same time the industrial side, the machine.” That balance has been present in his work for years—an interest in ritual without doctrine, belief without instruction. The work is often carried by the material and the setting rather than by explanation. Here, the rotating figures, sounds, and enclosure work together to create an environment that is felt before it is interpreted.

Redentora reads as a situation to be in, rather than a statement. It is a place within a place—a temporary, constructed, and open place. Visitors are meant to experience movement, image, and memory looping back upon themselves. As with much of Borondo’s work, the effect is cumulative: you enter, you adjust, and gradually the space begins to register, somewhere between the mechanical and the symbolic, the street and something very close to the stage.