Urban Fluxus

Cristina Palmese. José Luis Carles
There is a statement nowadays that is so commonplace: we live in the civilization of image. According to this topic, we live in a civilization submitted to the power of images in which the attention of theoreticians, researchers, even of designers or planners is centered fundamentally on visual perception. In a culture limited by the prevalence of visual objects, we hardly pay attention to the perceptual complexity of our body. Our perceptions are submitted to geometry, and to discreet and simplified observation, which enables a better control by means of prototypical designs and remote control, handling our interaction with the environment, of our desires, in some exhausted bodies, aligned.

Architecture, as a discipline devoted to space building, has been developed by means of following two remarkable characteristics of the western culture: the value of the objective knowledge in comparison to the subjective one and the prevalence of sight upon the other senses. Although the concept of architectural space has evolved, being modified and open to new categories (the space of the architecture can be considered a transparent space, a rhrizomatic space, a flowing space, a space without a place, a phenomenological space or a cyberspace), it is necessary to reappropriate the space starting from the rediscovery and the amplification of our own sensorial potentials.

We are willing to meditate upon that, and also to submit our minds to a sort of laboratory-processing and recreation of the environment with our body, opening our minds to new perceptual possibilities and new ways of consciousness. By means of “in situ” actions, we will experience creative forms of dealignment with regards to routines enabling the existence of unknown possibilities of inhabiting the space; with a collective participation, we outline the necessity of experimenting a new space-time that transforms the traditional and closed space concept in a place [territory] open of phenomena and events.

The taking into consideration of the value of the individual things, the sensitive things and the sensorial things that this proposal offers, constitutes a challenge against the growing development and globalization of the technologies, strongly used as tools for unification, and for social, commercial and territorial control.
There is a proposal for the creation of open, interactive and permeable systems versus closed and simple systems, built starting from what is given for granted as neuter data, that substitute and ignore any subject´s daily experience.
This fact of sharing the memory, the feelings, the emotions, the reflections and the recognition should lead the way to new forms of solidarity.

azca
AZCA

STRATA. ACTIONS IN THE URBAN SPACE

Workschop
Cristina Palmese, José Luis Carles,Laura García, Juan Camilo Sánchez, Victor Pastor, Carlos Estrella. Marisa Luceño, Fatima Martin, Javier Sanchez, Shary.

The first place chosen for our experimentation is Azca, one of the business centers and also the headquarters of the most important offices of the city of Madrid and characterized to house some of buildings more remarkable from the point of view of architecture and the urban landscape, as we can see in Edificio del BBVA bank or Torre Picasso.

The setting of this area is like an island with regards to the city. Its design, of a rigid geometry, responds to some private and commercial values, making impossible any possibility of the users’ creative experience. The range of possible activities allowed in this space is really reduced and controlled, catching its users in expressions and journeys pre – constituted, being also a space devoted to previously defined model of healthy body, basically inaccessibility and impossible to be shared by any type of difference.

This space type has also generated a dark conflict from a social point of view: when development and marginality share this place. It is a place with a daily cycle of double life, inhabited in the morning by workers and executive and at night by users of restaurants, pubs discos, sex-shops and other modalities of night leisure.
The configuration, spatially stratified, as it displays a complicated system of connection among the buildings, the pedestrian area and the labyrinth of the basement tunnels have favored some unclean, abandoned or marginal spaces, apart from providing a shelter for the homeless.

Our objective is the one of experiencing different stimuli in such an inhospitable place, proposing performative actions and interventions that enable the common and creative use of the space, implying the inhabitants, so much in a routinary or in an occasional way, inviting to artists and researchers to face this space.

With these actions it is intended to share stimuli and stimulate to the action, the search of new intimacies, new demands; to sum it up: new perceptual possibilities in public areas that are outside the schema of the massive control to which we are (and many times unconsciously) subjected.