Ephemeral eucharistic chapel for the Feast of Families

Place: Madrid
Date: 2012
Developer: Madrid Archbishopric
Design/direction: Eduardo Delgado Orusco & Javier Viver Gómez
Team: Javier Rincón Sánchez, Miriam García García, Miguel Quirós Esteban, Rubén Sesmero Blanco, Belén Vegas (Granda), Antonio Vázquez (Granda), Francisca Soto (Granda), Manuel Taboada (Granda), Pepi García (Los Rosales), Pilar Romero (Los Rosales)

 

 

 

Coinciding with the dates of the Family Celebration holiday, celebrated each year by the archbishopric of Madrid, the municipality of Madrid had rented a space in the adjacent Gardens of Discovery for the installation of a cinema in a geodesic dome with a projecting screen that allowed an intense immersion in the movie. Opposite to the usual frontal viewpoint of the conventional cinemas, this system of projection on a concave screen of 360º achieved a certain reconstruction of the human binocular stereoscopy. This supposed a momentary loss of spatial references existing in a conventional cinema hall-ground, horizon, projection borders etc.-which accentuated the immersion effect.

Given these conditions, I asked for the collaboration of Javier Viver, as an audiovisual artist. In the dome, it was necessary to reorder the space in relation to a visual center in which the Eucharistic custodia will be placed, and towards which the gazes should direct naturally. Disposing of a large cupola determined the interior architecture, the location of the custodia and of other elements. Therefore, we decided to place the Eucharistic custodia upon a big expository-lighthouse of approximately 3 m of height, in the central axis of the cupola. All the believers would surround the lighthouse in a radial way, raising the eyesight towards the exposed Eucharist.