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Occasional cities |
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In June, Martí Peran and Giovanni La Varra will hold a seminar, a question-and-answer session and some workshops at the Santa Mònica Arts Centre under the name Occasional
cities. The Post-it city and other temporary formats. The aim is to reflect on the relevance of architecture, town planning and art in the use of space in the city and, most importantly, on the controversial role of art between documenting and stimulating such use. From this set of activities will be derived a research project which will travel around other cities for a year to return to the CCCB in Barcelona in autumn 2006.
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MARTÍ PERAN
For some years, contemporary culture has been particularly concerning with thinking about the city from many different angles. The phenomenon can be explained very simply: the city is the territory where the contemporary experience is developed and it must therefore be the setting for any attempt to answer questions as important as the emergence of new subjectivities, the appearance of new ways of working and resisting, the use of culture as a top-level economic resource, the growing intermediary role of any attempt at communication or any other of the many things we might mention. The city is, in fact, the setting where the here-and-now experience of the relevance of examining it and dissecting it is carried on. In this operation, as has been widely pointed out, the city appears as a double figure. On one hand, it appears as a regulated and perfectly ordered setting, willing to provide a pattern for how we should interpret our lives there in reaction to it; on the other hand, the city has also made it clear that, despite all this, its body is full of cracks and fissures, undermining its overweening position. It is from this latter perspective that contemporary culture is discovering opportunities to wound the traditional city and simultaneously revealing in its place the city's full potential as a place for conflict and a place for freely constructing our way of life in it.
From among the multiple formulas that have been used to express the possible reconquest of the city beyond imposed predeterminations, a crucially important mainstay is represented by support for the idea of citizen users; that is, the demand for citizenship based on the use of the city dictated by changing, subjective needs. |
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| Maria Papadimitriou, T.A.M.A., 1998-2004 |
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This backdrop is the one that also lies behind notions such as the invisible city (Giancarlo De Carlo), instant city (Lars Lerup) or post-it city (Giovanni La Varra). All these labels, beyond the details that mark them out, share an interest in detecting the real uses of the city outside predictions and pre-established norms and, at the same time, they denote the magnitude of the infinite number of cartographies that could replace the closed, static map of the city offered as a banal subject for passive, disciplined consumption.
The concept of post-it city formulated by La Varra – and which
we have taken as an excuse to express the project Occasional
cities. Post-it city and temporary formats – seems to us particularly
a particularly didactic one. To deduce its scope, one only needs to think of
what happens when we actually use a post-it: on a previously established
text (the city) we impose a sign that prioritises a different order from the
initial one. However, at the same time, this signal corresponds only to a subjective
interest and, for that very reason, it is also an ephemeral framework, and there
is no intention for it to remain or to impose itself. If we transfer this to
another register, we can derive from it the characteristics which, for La Varra,
define post-it cities:
they show an uncoded, temporary use of space with an implicitly critical spirit.
A occasional cities of this kind is, then, something that appears unpredictably
and, because of this unexpected mould-breaking nature, it always represents a
critical gesture, whether or not this is consciously explicit. Along these lines,
it would perhaps be a good idea to reconsider the possibilities contained in
what is inappropriately called un-civic use of the city; particularly
in the context of a Barcelona which is stubbornly proud of its nineteenth-century
leanings.
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| Francisca Benítez, SUKKAH, 2001 |
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This approach to the multiplication of uses superimposed on each other in the city's space is, of course, an ideal platform for continuing to reformulate the notion of public space, a recurring issue which has ultimately too often become rigid under principles which are not the original ones but which are equally closed and cold (space for difference, communication, transit, antagonism...) to the point where they can very easily be incorporated into the ordinary coding of the city. We only need to remember, for example, how the public mobilisations against the war or the reactions against the Forum 2004 were added without any difficulty to the collection of virtues expanding the Barcelona brand. However, real experiences which appear as post-its are often slight and extremely fleeting in nature and are difficult for the official discourse to swallow up. Imagine an election campaign advert which, instead of using the noisy public protests by people banging pots and pans as a paradigm of the citizen participation they want to promote, allows itself to be led through the city by some vandal nerd explorers? |
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| The occasional cities we suggest as a
subject of study are, effectively, very hard to grasp. It
is probable that the very operation of considering the phenomenon
will not achieve much more than providing a collection of
partial and biased documents. In fact, as has already been
said, the ephemeral nature of these uses of the city involves
the absence of traces. The incidental city hardly leaves
a footprint; it is, to put it another way, one of the most
radical formats of deforming, non-contingent and unrepresentable
nomadism described in detail by Deleuze and Guattari. These
difficulties |
| implicit in trying to catch a post-it in the city before it disappears or is moved somewhere else are reproduced when it comes to defining the possible links between the phenomenon and artistic practice. In fact, this is one of the most problematic points – that is why we want to analyse it in the programme we are putting on this summer – given that the options put forward place artistic action in a position that is full of ambiguities. On one hand, it seems as if the best thing would be to limit ourselves to documenting the reality of incidental cities, the numerous post-its infecting the space of the city; but this action is not only difficult because of the problems with detecting the phenomenon that we have mentioned; it must also, above all, be resolved in such a way that it does not limit itself to recording it. It needs to be able to distil the entire critical component in order to empower it, otherwise it would merely provide an entertaining reportage. The second possible action, which is even more complex, could be that of considering the artistic action itself as a post-it or stimulus for its circumstantial appearance. What initially may seem very effective and operative actually suffers from the chronic paradox involved in bearing the weight of the very idea of art. If circumstantial cities really denote the multiplicity of ways of life circulating without any kind of obedience, they will hardly allow themselves to be brought into line by the rhetoric of art. |
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| Kenny Cupers, Spaces of uncertainty |
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