Jesús Madriñán

Washington Store

Jesús Madriñan’s main subject is the exploration of identity from a generational and biographical perspective, spurred by the need to understand the reality around him. In his project, he examines how various physical and virtual contexts can play an important role in the development of identity. These include after-hour clubs, nightclubs, and social media, all regular spaces of interaction closely connected to his generation.

In Washington Store, Madriñan delves into the use of contact apps, particularly the self-proclaimed “world’s leading dating app for the LGBTQ community.” Here, the process of constructing digital identity is especially symptomatic, as it promotes the development of an objectifying view of digital others, and, at the same time, the construction, consciously or otherwise, of an objectified self representing the user in virtual space.

Based on this reflection, Jesús Madriñan invited a large number of the app’s users to meet him in an old warehouse in the city, at the same time on the same day, in order to produce a large-scale collective portrait. The idea was to assemble, in a specific physical location, people unknown to each other but accustomed to sharing a space on the virtual plane, while also representing the social reality of the time and place in which they live: Washington, D.C. The result is a personal generational story in the era of modernity and liquid love.