The time was 8 p.m. I was just leaving a collective exhibition at a gallery in Madrid, following months in which my life had been reduced to the walls of my home and the supermarket. I suddenly found myself strolling down a noisy thoroughfare buzzing with cars, a strange feeling invading my body. It was a transit point between offices and a bus station, the main gateway to the centre of the city. I felt as if it had been decades since the last time I crossed that avenue.

As I walked down the street, I became conscious of my surroundings. A heavily lit building full of empty offices and meeting rooms for lease. A closed discotheque with two gigantic red doors and gold, lion’s head door handles, like the entrance to a scene from “Eyes Wide Shut”. Opposite I saw a popular Chinese restaurant, a cultural hybrid, no doubt financed by an investment fund. Next came an advertising agency, one founded years ago. After, a gym owned by a famous footballer. And lastly, a prestigious business school. As I pressed on down the street, my face gradually changed.

All this caught my attention for one reason: despite their appearance, they were ruins, relics of a bygone time.

I was walking among the vestiges of the past; stones which no longer serve a purpose, yet which are still there. Companies, businesses, current institutions, all ruins at birth. Some had not yet appeared, still do not exist, but when they do, they will already be ruins.

What is the reason for this? Why are they the ruins of an historical period which continues to exist?

Because the pillars propping them up have crumbled, and nobody has noticed. They are invisible ruins, and do not make it easy to move beyond individualism, precariousness, competition, status, the colonising effect of globalisation, cultural impoverishment, body worship, glory.

For in the midst of the climate crisis and the death throes of the neoliberal system, we need businesses that defy norms and the logic of productivity and growth, which are conscientious and not only coexist with reality, but help to regenerate it. Businesses which endeavour to be the architectures of the future. Or to be aliens that are not of this world, but of other far-away and highly distinct worlds. All this I found in the multiple artistic discourses on display hours earlier, in the exhibition.

So I continued to walk home, with my head someplace else, trying to come to grips with what had just happened.

When I got home, I realised that I had opened my eyes, that this had been an awakening.