Strange Sights in Madrid

         If you don’t know, I have strange taste when it comes to the media I really enjoy. I eat up stuff like Over the Garden Wall, Endacopia, The Music of Erich Zann, Voices of the Void, and Samorost. Media that defies explanation, traditional storytelling, and sometimes even interpretation resonates with something in me and my experience of this world. For the sake of this post, we will call this style and feeling “surrealist,” which captures the feeling pretty well (which, to be perfectly transparent, is mostly defined by my own opinions and feelings!).

        All that to say, when I arrived in Madrid, I was surprised to start noticing strange things that resonate with me in that same way. So much so that I started taking pictures with the sole purpose of capturing that feeling. Tall repeating buildings captured at an odd angle. Fake bricks that look worse than the original wall they were carved into. Infinite sky and a woman's stretched head. This blog post is to share some of those points of interest and figure out what about them I love.  And just for fun? Let's rank the strangest out of five.

        Starting with the 5^th strangest thing: Universidad de Carlos III Madrid’s Campus (UC3M).

The Big Brick in the sky

         Walking into Campus for the first time when I was scouting the route, I was met with bricks and not much else. The paths? Bricks. The buildings? All bricks. Only bricks. The stairs? Bricks. Some of them were stone bricks, some were classic brown bricks, but they were all bricks. Even the buildings were so square, they just looked like giant bricks. The trees? Okay, those weren’t bricks, but they were small and evenly spaced. The whole place was reddish-brown and square. The little trees and grass that were allowed to grow between the large brick paths would soon turn red and brown as autumn approaches. This place was strange in a more comical way. Like the engineering school was designed by engineers to maximize building size and minimize costs. It made me laugh, and I hoped the interior was better designed (Not much better, but not much reddish-brown). 

        At number 4, we have this random place I found while wandering back home in my first week. I won’t look it up because I want to preserve the feeling I was left with.

Under, where there is only water and stone

         As the photo describes, the place was dark, under a building, and created with geometric panels of concrete and metal. But what is difficult to pick out in the photo is that, to the right, there was a corner with a waterfall. It filled this modern cavern with the smooth sounds of flowing water and added one more thing that was just not normal. Why was there a waterfall under a building? What was the point of this publicly accessible tunnel? Even with the light of day and lights on the floor, the place was dark with metal and concrete. I just walked around it for a while, looking at it from different angles while the constant, calm gurgling mingled with the traffic and bounced at odd angles off the walls and ceiling.

         At number 3, we have the closest thing to the Backrooms in Madrid. My friend, Evelyn, has student housing in a place called Mi Casa Inn.

Reminds me of Exit 8 too...

         Evelyn took some of our friend group here just to show us how strange it was. The walls were all glossy, reflective white and long, straight out of the Lumon Company from Severance (which I started watching on the plane to Madrid and quite enjoyed). The hallways were the most liminal, but the communal spaces were strange as well. There was a life-size wall art of a woman eating strawberries in the game room, along with some cringey motivational wall stickers in the gym room (which was dark and had a slanted ceiling) making health puns out of the word “Inn” inside the dumbbells the mustachioed man was lifting. There was also a poster in one room with… an edgy quote and some cuddling ladies behind it. It was trying to have a modern American aesthetic, but the lack of windows, the breaking of the minimalist quo for strange posters, and the long hallways cemented it as a surreal place in my mind, and I was very curious as to the story behind it. It always surprised me, and I was anticipating what it would do differently next as we wandered the place. Despite how bland it was, it was unpredictable!

         The second strangest place I’ve found in Madrid was, curiously, the sky. The vast majority of the time, it is a pure blue. I noticed this pretty quickly while I took pictures around Madrid: none of them had clouds. I started taking pictures of buildings with only the blue sky to accompany them. Here are a few:

Different everytime, but the same thing.

Would be even better if there weren't any shadows.

"Why the long face?"

         There are some really fun things you can do with these clearest skies. That reflective photo is one of my favorite ones in this “series” of mine. Each individual reflection is different from the others, yet they all are distortions of the original. I think these photos and instances lend a very important clue to what all these things have in common (besides my feeling that they are). Both high-detail and lack thereof are intentional placements and creations with reason. But something happens when there is a mix of high-detail and no-detail without interpretation. The audience (me) feels like there has to be a reason or meaning behind the imbalance, so we think about it longer than usual. This is a good theory, as it explains why I dislike modern abstract art. Often, those pieces have a very homogeneous amount of detail (colored boxes, or random splatters of paint, for example). The effect of this detail contrast can also be felt in cases where things look simple until further investigation (like The Backrooms). These sky photos have detail in the way the buildings are captured, and in the buildings themselves, but the detail of the sky is contrastingly empty. 

         The strangest place in Madrid I just found this week. Engenio Trias Municipal Biblioteca. On Google Maps, it’s a library, but that is just the tip of the iceberg. That is the simple surface you see when you find this place for the first time.

Surely, at one point or another, this was in use.

Actually, though. What could the purpose be?

The Greening Tower of Pisa

         This is a library, but the books are just the cover. Somehow it manages to be a park, library, a prison, and a zoo all in one. Why was it built on the same land as a massive park with at least four playgrounds? Why are there two of what I can only imagine as prison cells across from each other with a monkey-exhibit-style hole in the ground between them, complete with sheet-metal animals and informational plaques? Why are the only real animals Peacocks, and they aren’t even in an exhibit? How to they keep them from running? Why have exhibits without animals? Why is there an elf on top of one of the cells? Why are there cells in the first place? Said quite simply, this place defies explanation, especially to someone from the States. However, is it too much random stuff? It is sort of the antithesis of UC3M’s campus of bricks. There is green and life everywhere, but there is also everything else everywhere. It almost drowns itself out. What I think causes this place to give me the same feeling is the fact that these library attractions are placed with intention. The prison cells were facing each other with a pit in the middle. The playgrounds all extended out on the same side, following into the park section. The library, despite its eccentricities, was still the first thing you saw when walking in. I don’t know what, but that causes me to wonder about the story of this place.  And I think that is the real conclusion here. It's not that the detail contrast gives me a weird feeling and is a good way to do art, but that some of what, in my opinion, makes this type of interesting story comes from places and things that struggle to tell their own story. The detail contrast is simply a pattern I noticed about this type of thing. There is something so human about having a wonderful and interesting story to tell, but not being able to adequately enough to capture the full intended effect. As an audience, I find such enjoyment in imagining those stories with the clues I am given, not as a scavenger hunt, but as a new story itself. Stories from stories from stories.

“Ain’t that just the way,” –Gregory