ESPACIO DE TODO 2021 [ENG]

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Esta publicación ha sido editada por Todo por la Praxis en diciembre de 2021, gracias a las Ayudas a la creación a espacios independientes 2020-2021

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INDEX Espacio de Todo (Space of All)>>>4 Todo por la Praxis (All for the Praxis) >>>6 Pipa!>>>8 Anarchivo (Anarchive)>>>10 Barrionalismo (Neighborhoodnalism)>>>14 Un grito en la calle (A shout in the street) >>>Elena Blesa>>>16 Coyuntura en obra (Juncture at work )>>>8 Black Box>>>Todo por la Praxis>>>40 Otro(s)ures (Other(s)ouths)>>>62 No es frontera ni el acento ni la piel (Neither accent nor skin is a border)>>>Guillermina Mongan/ Carolina Chacón/ Glenda Zapata>>>64 Techo Sostenido (Sustained Roof)>>>76 Siembre Aquí! (Sow Here!)>>>Daniela Ruiz Moreno/ Natalia Pilo-Pais/ Ugo Martínez>>>78 IDYS_Instituto do it yourself>>>Todo por la Praxis>>>84 Recetas (Recipes) 2021>>>94

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ESPACIO DE TODO (Space of all)

terests and thus reciprocally nourish these common creative processes. The aim of sharing the workspace is to create new contexts that form an open community where we build knowledge from other modes of relations in the field of art, trying to generate affects and effects that manage to intervene in hegemonic cultural and artistic practices as an exercise of resistance, from a mutant management of contents.

“What an installation, a performance, a concept or a mediated image can do with its formal and semiotic means is to mark a possible or real change regarding the laws, customs, measures, notions of civility, the technical or organisational devices that define how we should behave and how we should relate to each other in a certain time and place. What we are looking for in art today is a different way of living, a fresh opportunity for coexistence”. Brian Holmes

www.espaciodetodo.es As Todo por la Praxis (TXP) collective, we are located in an industrial building located in the Vallecas neighbourhood of Madrid1, which we restructured and renamed Espacio de Todo (Space of All) in 2021. This place works as our own work space and simultaneously it opens to contain two initiatives that dialogue and nurture our creative projects: the already existing Instituto do it yourself (IDYS) (Do It Yourself Institute) as a platform for critical pedagogy and action, and the research and artistic production platform called PIPA!

Notes 1. In this space, from 2015 to 2019 the collective managed the Do It Yourself Institute (IDYS), which hosted collaborative projects implemented by the collective itself as an exercise in common learning, and research into collaborative practices through the construction of an archive, as well as supporting a series of selfconstruction, participation and mediation activities. This space has now become a working platform within the Espacio de Todo, maintaining its original dynamic and expanding towards work in educational environments.

The Espacio de Todo (Space of All) is designed to host our own processes as well as to welcome and share those of others, in order to subvert the idea of production subject to the official system. The IDYS line of work contains the TXP projects that rethink the collective learning processes, the co-design and the relationship between pedagogy and art in formal and non-formal educational environments. PIPA!, on the other hand, is linked to the production of work and discourse as a political aesthetic exercise of the collective in the field of art, seeking to sustain a permanent dialogue with other artistic agents through invitations, to work collaboratively with our curatorial in5


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Artistic collective founded more than 20 years ago that, from 2020 onwards, begins to build an open community around a circle of collaborators articulated by the duo that currently integrates it, the visual artist, researcher and educator Jo Muñoz (CL) and the architect and artist Diego Peris López (ESP).

and social control, are now spreading as critical devices that seek to question these and other stories from aesthetic/political counter-narratives. The means of do it yourself, collective constructions and open source architecture are beginning to be analysed from notions of critical pedagogy that contest non-formal education as a field of dialogical experimentation towards autonomy.

The main focus of their initial themes was citizen activism in public and common spaces as an alternative to the neoliberal city. Today their interests are amplified, focusing on dissidence as political forms of resistance that construct other possible imaginaries. A work that analyses current contexts from a mutant perspective, which implies the challenge of creating, approaching and embracing radical discourses, antagonistic to hegemonic cultural impositions. Thus, they move from lines of action positioned in collaborative practices as a response to the needs of the communities, towards collaborative practices that seek to install spaces for critical thinking. This makes it possible to activate new transcultural subjectivities, as forms of emancipation and decolonisation of dominant thinking, based on processes of research/production/action in both geographical and symbolic territories.

A praxis that for a long time responded to needs is now a praxis that is being questioned www.todoporlapraxis.es

Projects that develop and use agitprop, counter-advertising and visibilisation or guerrilla communication to question the city model and its consequences, such as gentrification, evictions, segregation, touristification 7


Pipa!

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PIPA! (Platform for research and artistic production)

used the recycling of a work of the collective called Residencia Monumento (Monument Residence)1 as a working space, which we have reconstructed within the space for the creative deployment of the guests. In addition, for the results of the different activities, we have adapted the front of the space to convert it into a permanent street gallery.

This platform takes as a reference the southern geolocation of Madrid, where the space is located, to build a relationship that conceptually permeates artistic and research practices. Its curatorial line of work raises the notion of the south as a symbolic condition to be questioned from different types of contemporary art projects. We want to ask ourselves what it means to be south, who is south, and why the binary determinations associated with the globally installed term. The actions generated through the associated programming aim to produce an aesthetic and critical reflection on what it implies, exploring a type of decentralization that fosters other relations and results between artistic agents with diverse discourses and places of enunciation. The elements that converge here allow a territorial and symbolic power that nourishes the investigative and creative practice, both of the collective and of our guests.

Food, as part of the sharing of these processes, is a transversal element that allows us to think together, conversing our cultural and identity practices in order to strengthen their collective critical capacity. That is why we have instituted that all the processes and results are crossed by the cuisine that both we and our guests prepare and share to reflect on the projects we carry out. Notes 1.http://todoporlapraxis.es/residencia-monumento/

Under four working modalities that are directly related to specific spaces located within the Espacio de Todo (Space of All), the results that operate under this curatorial line are being configured: Barrionalismos (Neighborhoodnalism); Coyuntura en obra (Juncture at work); Otro(s) ures (Other(s)ouths);Techo Sostenido (Sustained Roof) and Anarchivo (Anarchive). The working mechanism are research and production residencies, which operate through invitations that depend on public support for the space, or the hosting of projects that are of interest to this conceptual framework, and which have their own funding. For the residencies, we have 9


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ANARCHIVO (Anarchive) This space is structured from the continuity of the archive of collaborative practices created in 2019 and continuing its construction towards an anarchive that feeds and increases its collection from the research carried out under the curatorship of PIPA! on an independent, horizontal and democratic basis. The elements that make up this anarchive seek to explore different formats that deconstruct the institutionalised notion of what an archive should be, being mutant and permeable to the diverse processes that are generated from it and that feed back into its content. Since 2021, the art historian Fidel Villar Barquín (ESP) has been in charge of the revision, ordering, systematisation and analysis of this archive.

Fidel Villar Barquín (Haro, 1995) holds a degree in Art History and a Master’s degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture at the Complutense University of Madrid. He has participated in various conferences at national and international universities and has published articles in different magazines. His research is linked to sexual dissidence, the bodies that inhabit the margins, the AIDS crisis and the impact of HIV on the visual arts and literature. He is currently working on his doctorate at the Autónoma University of Madrid under the title: “Derivas desde el sur: un análisis de lo seropositivo” (Drifts from the South: an analysis of the HIV-positive).

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Archivar como forma de conocer(se) (Archiving as a way of knowing <and know one self>)

archiving. And of a moment in which you realise that there are practices that are connected from the materials that had remained in storage, that the archive itself has mutated, that the materials that fell into your drawers have become related to each other, have spoken and have developed their own groups from which you are now forced to look at them.

Over the last few years, the archive has become a permanent reality in the world of contemporary art and art history. The very idea of the archive has only evolved, blurring the very definitions that we could apply to what an archive is.

This Anarchive, formerly known as the IDYS Archive (Do It Yourself Institute) was focused on research into collaborative practices. In a first approach to the archives there was an intention to look at the archive as a whole, to organise a system that would allow us to know everything that was there. To be able to go beyond the lines of force that were marked and what were the other crossroads that were relevant in the construction of this new Anarchive. This archive is evolving with the idea of nourishing the work of the people invited to carry out residencies in the Espacio de Todo (Space for All), as well as the work of the TXP collective. And that the same material that is being produced in response to what one encounters will be returned to the Anarchivo (Anarchive). This creates, therefore, a cyclical will of self-feeding from which to begin the construction of other kinds of discourses.

Michel Foucault in the Archaeology of Knowledge stated that the archive was a system through which culture pronounced itself on the past. How to define an archive? According to the RAE (Royal Spanish Academy of the Language), it is an “ordered set of documents that a person, a society, an institution, etc., produce in the exercise of their functions or activities”. There is, therefore, a principle of grouping: the archive requires unifying, identifying, classifying within a system or previously selected elements that will articulate this configuration1. But archiving is also the very place where they are kept, and the same action of archiving. Whether it is a physical or virtual archive, fictional or real, these places transform, grow, evolve. Sometimes there is a will from the beginning, a clear knowledge of the direction the materials you have collected are going to take. Sometimes, by pure chance, the materials begin to arrive, the archive is forced to be created, we see a staging of an unwanted

We cannot, nor do we want to, deny the problems that throughout history have been associated with archiving, evidently no archive is exempt from an 12


outside, no matter how much will we may have, voids always exist, realities and lives never enter an archive in their entirety. Derrida talked about of archival violence2, and when one looks at what the trafficking of archives from museum institutions has meant, one becomes more aware of the violence of the archive.

that of anyone who needs it, that of everyone. It is a mutant, changing archive, in constant movement and always open to others, so that they can invade it, underline it, embrace it and make it their own. Because this is how one knows oneself, by conserving, looking at the past to think about the present and directing one’s gaze towards the utopia of the future.

We could perhaps agree that for us an archive is a common space, a place from which to generate new systems and elements from which to think collectively, to build together. In these new processes from the Espacio de Todo (Space for All), these intersecting realities allow us to search for a common memory, a meaning beyond the object itself.

Notes 1. Anna Maria Guasch, Arte y archivo 1920-2010. Genealogías, tipologías y discontinuidades, Akal, Madrid, 2011, p. 10. 2. Jacques Derrida, Mal de archivo, Editorial Trotta, Madrid, 1997, p. 15.

The Anarchive is also constituted as a support for the research residencies and the artistic processes of the TXP collective, born as a space from which to decentralise contemporary artistic practices in Madrid, with a relationship with the neighbourhood in which it is located. The archives are crossed by Vallecas, by the struggles of the neighbourhoods, as we could see in the residency “Un grito en la calle” (A shout in the street) by Elena Blesa Cábez. New exercises and political interests are looking southwards, towards migrant bodies in Spain, mourning and colonial order as in the residency Otros(s)ures (Other(s) outhes) by Guille Mongan, Carolina Chacón and Glenda Zapata. These processes are now also our archive, 13


Barrionalismo

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BARRIONALISMOS (Neighborhoodnalism) A mediation residency whose objective is to work with the collective identities of the neighbourhoods through a direct exercise with local organisations and agents. The idea is to generate a permanent space for collaborative creation with the environment, based on the geographical and symbolic articulation of being located in the south of Madrid. The interest in opening this area of work arises from the sustained relationship that TXP has had with some of these neighbourhoods. The aim is to maintain the relations of dialogue through art with the agents that exist and with whom we have worked over the years, as well as to build new articulations with those that emerge, opening up the possibility of our artistic work contributes to a symbolic redistribution that involves making other narratives visible. This implies making a connection between these social spaces with mediating artists and researchers from where a series of processes can emerge in context.

from collective methodologies and dialectical practice. Since 2018 I am artist in residence at FASE (L’Hospitalet de Llobregat) and coordinator of the education and mediation projects in the Visual Arts Programme Can Felipa. I am part of the assembly of the Institute of Radical Imagination -a transnational work platform that experiments with the crossings between arts and activism from the practice of militant researchand of the Frente Sudaka -a transfeminist and decolonial research/action collective.

As the first residency of the Espacio de Todo (Space of All), we invited the artist and mediator Elena Blesa Cábez (ESP) to carry out this research for a month, between 1 and 31 july 2021, who worked with the environment of Vallecas and its slogans. Elena Blesa Cábez (La Sénia, Tarragona, 1988) My name is Elena Blesa Cábez, I am a researcher, artist and mediator. My research focuses on the analysis of strategies adopted by contemporary art to rethink the concept of citizenship today. Situating myself in an intermediate point between pedagogy and artistic production, I work mainly

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Un grito en la calle (A shout in the street)

at getting the administrations to invest in improving basic elements such as street lighting or sewage systems in their neighbourhoods, although it is not possible to start from the premise of the existence of a single cause to explain a historical phenomenon as complex as the emergence of these movements and associations. The historian Marc Suanes explains that a social movement is a system of narratives, a system of cultural records of its time, a set of explanations of how certain social conflicts are expressed socially1 . It is precisely this narrativity of the social movement, its capacity for self-explanation, that interested us in this project.

Through shouts, proclamations and slogans, the residents on the streets have expressed their demands and claims in relation to the neighbourhood, but what has happened between Vallecas Nuestro (Our Vallecas) -1976- and the current demands of associations, residents and collectives? In this research we set out to think about how language, both oral and written, has been used in relation to the construction of the social and political imaginary of Vallecas. We wanted to review which voices currently make up the discourses present in the public space, connecting them with the historical imaginary of the neighbourhood, in order to trace what modifications there have been in their updating.

With the end of the dictatorship, many of the endemic problems that already existed in Vallecas and many other neighbourhoods continued to drag on. After Franco’s death, the Municipal Management of Urbanism drew up three Partial Plans - territorially limited urban development plans - that affected Vallecas and aimed to manage its urban development problems. In these new Partial Plans, the expulsion of the population was proposed for the benefit of large landowners. At that moment, a new neighbourhood counter-offensive began, which reached its peak in a demonstration in June 1976. It was a time of “crisis of representation, crisis of the old revolutionary projects and forms of organisation. In short, a panorama marked by uncertainty, but also by the emergence of new forms of

As a starting point we decided to analyse the proclamations used by the historical neighbourhood movements in Vallecas. In post-war Madrid, a number of neighbourhood associations emerged with the aim of demanding an improvement in their living conditions. The seed of the neighbourhood movement and other associations in the neighbourhood was the precariousness of the housing in the suburbs that originated as a consequence of the rapid internal immigration of Spaniards to Madrid. Neighbourhood demands were aimed 17


between Vallecas Nuestro (Our Vallecas) (1976) and the current demands of associations, neighbours and collectives? Social movements are very diverse, but in a rather simplistic way we could differentiate between classic and current social movements. The classic movements would include the labour movement, the trade union movement and neighbourhood associations which, with the arrival of democracy and the welfare state, underwent a process of institutionalisation in which many of their members ended up forming part of official political parties. The new social movements are generally more assembly-based and reject institutionalisation. They propose citizen participation to achieve their mobilising force and their structure tends to be more decentralised and organic, which sometimes makes their continuity over time difficult5.

life, of new experiential aggregations, of unprecedented forms of political mobilisation, of themes that take up the power of the ‘no’, based on social self-organisation2”. From the end of the 1960s onwards, these neighbourhood struggles were articulated by the recently created Neighbourhood Associations. In fact, the Palomeras Bajas association was the first to be set up in 1968, taking advantage of an associative formula that the Franco regime had established for other purposes3. In the 1976 demonstration, some 25,000 people marched through the neighbourhood chanting “Vallecas Nuestro” (Our Vallecas). This event became part of the historical heritage of the Vallecas neighbourhood movement. As anthropologist Elízabeth Lorenzi explains in her book Vallekas puerto de mar. Fiesta, identidad de barrio y movimientos sociales (Vallekas sea port. Party, neighborhood identity and social movements) “a year later another decisive event took place, an agreement by which the Ministry of Housing delimited the area for the execution of the three partial plans, the land where the 12,000 families affected would be rehoused, and which also decreed the expropriation of the land of the large landowners. The achievement of so many struggles is beginning to be glimpsed4”.

This brief introduction serves to situate the first phase of the project, in which, in parallel to the review of archival textual and photographic material provided by Sergio Cabrera and complemented by a visit to the Anarchivo of the Espacio de Todo (Space of All), we met to talk with several people linked to various social movements, both neighbourhood and other types of associations. From the 1960s to the present day, all kinds of slogans have been launched in a multitude of mobilisations. Many of them became paintings6, stickers,

There is a question that runs through this project: what has happened 18


posters or other material that has generated an informal archive in which one can detect many of the demands that have crossed these movements and the evolution they have undergone. Shouts and slogans such as “We want our rights and we want them now”, “Right to a roof over our heads” or “Our parents emigrated, not us, housing here and now” are present. This trail can also be followed through the memory of those people and associations involved in these processes who agreed to talk to us over the summer.

of other narratives is being demanded by various collectives, such as Orgullo Vallekano, which are committed to breaking with the discursive, gestural and visual imagery traditionally associated with the associative left and to generating propositional discourses. These new ways of doing things put social rights, autonomy and collective care at the centre, breaking with traditional ideological positions. This could be one of the main differences with the Neighbourhood Associations that still survive today. This part of the research was complemented with a series of routes through different parts of the neighbourhood where we detected a greater presence of this type of proclamations in the public space. During these walks, we photographed them, whether they were posters, paintings, stickers, T-shirts, etc. From these photographs, we systematised all the information by writing all the text on a large mural that we then used during the workshop as a reference. In addition to organising the material by zones and themes, and making visible those words that were recurrently repeated, this emptying served to free the message of any visual burden. Within the social movements, certain highly connoted aesthetics have been generated - through the use of certain typographies, colours, compositions... -. They are visuals positioned on a political level, even more than the textual content itself, which can sometimes be very empty and

From these meetings we generated a map of agents or entities that we understand to be connected in some way with the neighbourhood movements that emerged from the sixties onwards and their struggles. These struggles were not only based on the demand for decent housing and public facilities, but also included feminist and anti-fascist associations. It is interesting to note how, from various associations and spaces such as La Villana de Vallekas7 -a selfmanaged social centre that brings together various collectives, such as PAH Vallecas, Orgullo Vallekano or the Escuela de las Periferias- there is a certain tendency to rescue a historical narrative that reproduces a stereotypical narrative in relation to Vallecas, leaving aside many other elements that could enrich and diversify it. At present, it is being reproduced in a way that does not fit in with social reality. The emergence 19


ambiguous, for example: “government resign”, “power is people” or “fight and resist”. Fight against what? who is resisting?

these themes was neither casual nor capricious; they allow us to trace a genealogy of these demands from the 1970s, when initiatives such as the Teatro de barrio obrero described their proposal in this way:

We also visited some of the spaces that the new collectives have tried to recover, claiming a territory with its own identifiable characteristics and not only defining itself as otherness or periphery. Through the creation of new spaces and traditions, the aim is to generate a new identity narrative, a new imaginary that revives a sense of community that has been disappearing in recent years with the processes of gentrification and displacement suffered in some of the neighbourhoods of Vallecas.

In the beginning it was necessity that created, back in the early 70s, the movement. We were against Franco. We demanded our daily problems as workers: the right to decent housing, the right to a sexual culture, the right to be people, against exploitation, against misery - in short, you know all about that situation8. This connection can also be read in the streets of Vallecas today, where, during walks, we find slogans such as: “They are not nostalgic, they are Nazis” or “Pride. Freedom to be9” . While it is true that there are ideological lines that are maintained, some of them clash in their approaches. Those who decide to write “Ayuso bitch” when they could write “Ayuso resign” are not exactly in line with those who feel the need to write “macho, question your privilege”, although a priori we could classify them all as left-wing proclamations.

In order to open up the research to those neighbours who are not part of any collective or association, we convened a workshop on 22 july 2021 at the Espacio de Todo (Space of All) to collectively investigate the uses of language in public space. In a twohour session, we will try to analyse the displacements and updates of different discourses and demands of a local nature, relating them to previously selected archival material. We invited each participant to bring to the session those slogans, cries, proclamations that they had seen or heard in the streets and that had generated interest. Thus, we proposed to work around the following themes: housing, public/common policies, feminist and LGTBIQ+ movement and anti/fascism. The selection of

The workshop was conceived as an open discussion through which to detect what changes there have been in the vocabulary present on walls and walls. New concepts and struggles that historically had no presence appear: transphobia, gentrification, social emergency, trans law, machirulo, ableism, eviction... Although some, 20


such as the notion of neighbourhood or working class, are still very present. In addition to reviewing the historical archive and the archive of graffiti and street texts that was generated during the month of residence, we stopped to analyse El barrio es nuestro (The neighbourhood is ours), a project carried out by the Todo por la Praxis (TXP) collective in 2012. This project was based on research with the collaboration of the Federación de Asociaciones de Vecinos de Madrid (FRAVM) in relation to neighbourhood movements through the compilation and revision of photographs of the different mobilisations carried out since the seventies. So the proposal of Un grito en la calle (A shout in the street) could be read as a sort of update of the exercise carried out by the collective almost ten years earlier. Most of the first neighbourhood demands were for improved facilities and neighbourhood development. For this reason, El barrio es nuestro (The neighbourhood is ours) was chosen as the guiding thread of this project10. This slogan sought to synthesise the spirit and slogans used in the various mobilisations to demand improvements in social services, public facilities and neighbourhood development11.

which has become part of the public sculpture park in Palomeras Bajas. I take the liberty of taking a brief look at this piece because, in one way or another, it has become part of the Vallecan imagination on many levels, both institutionally and personally. But that does not stop it from raising questions, questions that are not new. On the one hand, Daniel Villegas already reflected in 2012 on this piece and its affirmation: “Whose neighbourhood is it? From where is this assertion made? What is the context in which it is inserted? how does it become visible? These are some of the questions that appear when these words take shape12”. For this analysis, the left-wing and militant past of most of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood since the 1940s was once again used as a reference point. This stance is justified by a visible neglect on the part of municipal policy makers, although this is precisely what has also fuelled it. This district was the only one in Madrid that resisted the hegemony of the right, or at least it had been until the elections to the Madrid Assembly in 2021, in which the Partido Popular (People’s Party - PP) was also the most voted force in the electoral districts of Puente-Vallecas and Villa-Vallecas13.

For the 2012 project, the chosen slogan was articulated in different formats. In addition to the reproduction of this slogan on canvases, posters and stickers, a large “corporeal poster” - as the collective has called it - was built,

With this political shift to the right hovering over our workshop, the phase of analysis and reflection led to 21


this question: is it possible to update a slogan like “The neighbourhood is ours”? While some of the lines of action of social movements - such as the struggle for housing, public policies or more recently common, feminist and LGTBIQ+ movements or anti-fascist struggles - are still valid, who is the subject of these demands? Is there still a us capable of channelling community demands and desires? This “Vallecas is ours” or “The neighbourhood is ours” is based on a collective mode of enunciation. Under our, we sense a us that leads us to think of a collective desire that moves the community. Historically, a Vallekan political subject had developed, closely linked to a type of homogeneous leftwing militancy that has been fractured in recent years with the appearance in the public sphere of identity discourses that for years had been silenced by the hegemonic political discourses.

how public space has become an increasingly legislated space where any action, be it political or artistic, is increasingly complex in legal terms. From this arose the strategy that our dialogue with El barrio es nuestro (The neighbourhood is ours) should be seen as a momentary, ephemeral action. Based on a design developed with the questions that emerged from the workshop, we made a series of T-shirts and bags printed manually in silk-screen printing.

Thus, to close this research, we proposed a collective action, a subtle infiltration of the public space -a space that is increasingly legislated and controlled, increasingly impersonal and with less and less trace of these struggles in the streets- through which we invite reflection on the Vallekano imaginary. Faced with the impossibility of generating any kind of affirmation in dialogue with the historical proclamations, the questions open up. We chose to keep two of them: which neighbourhood? And how much ours? Since the cycle of revolts between 2011 and 2013, we have seen

On 31 july 2021 we went out dressed in T-shirts and bags printed with the slogan that emerged from the workshop. We instituted ourselves as a space of protest within the public space and liberated part of the textuality of the public sphere from its institutionalised or commodified character so typical of altermodernity. We close this phase of the project in a collective walk that takes us from the Espacio de Todo (Space of All) to the sculpture El barrio es nuestro (The neighbourhood is ours) to invite us, albeit temporarily, to think about whose neighbourhood it is.

We opted for this technique because it is one of the printing techniques that allows the best results and the greatest number of copies in a DIY way. Compared to other fully technical methods of image reproduction, screen printing allows us to control the printing process at all times and to generate our own production circuit without having to outsource it.

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didn’t, housing here and now / We don’t want to live among rubble / We are a piece of the city / The neighbourhood must be fixed. 11. Todo por la Praxis. “El barrio es nuestro”, retrieved from: https://todoporlapraxis.es/043el-barrio-es-nuestro/ 12. Daniel Villegas. “Whose neighbourhood is the neighbourhood?”, retrieved from: http:// todoporlapraxis.es/de-quien-es-el-barrio/ 13. Percentage of votes of the first parties by municipality, Madrid Assembly elections 2021. Retrieved from: https://resultados2021. comunidad.madrid/Resultados/Comunidad-deMadrid/r-1/es

Notes 1. Marc Suanes Larena, Plantant cara al sistema, sembrant les llavors del canvi: els moviments socials al Tarragonès (1975-2010) (Tarragona: Arola Editors, 2010), 12. 2.https://elpais.com/diario/1978/08/02/ madrid/270905058_850215.html 3. Todo por la Praxis. “Whose neighbourhood is it?”, retrieved from: http://todoporlapraxis.es/ de-quien-es-el-barrio/ 4.Elizabeth Lorenzini, Vallekas puerto de mar. Fiesta, identidad de barrio y movimientos sociales (Madrid: Traficantes de sueños, 2007), 40. 5.Marc Suanes Larena, Plantant cara al sistema, sembrant les llavors del canvi: els moviments socials al Tarragonès (1975-2010) (Tarragona: Arola Editors, 2010), 12. 6. I prefer the use of the word painted to the word graffiti, both because of an emotional and political connection and because I want to focus my attention on the message that they show and not on their aesthetic or artistic value. 7. https://www.lavillana.org/ 8. Sixto Rodríguez Leal, De Vallecas al Valle del Kas. Otra transición (Madrid: Radio Vallecas, 2017), 71. 9. Read in the street, Portazgo, 18/07/2021. 10. These and other slogans were compiled by TxP together with the Federación de Asociaciones de Vecinos de Madrid (FRAVM) in 2012. Some others were: We want our rights and we want them now / The neighbourhood is ours / Right to a roof / Save the neighbourhood / Solution: fight with the association / Housing here and now / Subsidised housing, speculative housing / Your house is outside / More solutions, less construction / We don’t want mud / I also want traffic lights / Our parents emigrated, we

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Documentation of posters, stickers and paintings in the neighborhood of Vallecas

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Documentation of posters, stickers and paintings in the neighborhood of Vallecas

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Workshop July 22 at Elena Blesa’s residence

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Preparation of fideuà for the presentation of the process of “Un grito en la calle” at Espacio de Todo

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Bags and t-shirts produced in silkscreen printing for the action in the public space of “Un grito en la calle”

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Silkscreen printing for “Un grito en la calle”.

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Action in the public space of “Un grito en la calle”

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Action in the public space of “Un grito en la calle”

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Action in the public space of “Un grito en la calle”

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Presentation of the process and result of “Un grito en la calle” at Espacio de Todo

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Sculpture “El barrio es nuestro” by TXP at the Palomeras bajas open air sculpture museum.

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Action in the public space of “Un grito en la calle” in TXP’s sculpture “El barrio es nuestro”

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Billboard of “Un grito en la calle” located at the front of the Espacio de Todo

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Coyuntura en obra

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COYUNTURA EN OBRA (Juncture at work) This programmatic action consists of carrying out a process of research and creation of work that works directly with current political, social and cultural issues, that is, elements that trigger a concern to be reviewed from the critical and symbolic capacity of artistic practice, capable of generating a counter-narrative that questions the ways in which official narratives and histories are constructed by the powers. In this first edition, the aim was to unveil institutional racism through the reality of precarious temporary migrants, alluding to the discrimination and violation of the rights of illegal workers both in the south of Spain and in the country’s large cities. To initiate this way of addressing these conflicts, in 2021 we ourselves as Todo por la Praxis (All for the Praxis) carried it out, to promote this work methodology of the collective. *For this project, the art historian Fidel Villar Barquín, in charge of the research, the visual artist Fernando Ossandón Zubieta, who has created the watercolours that are part of the project, and Sergio Cabrera as a collaborator, have worked with Todo por la Praxis.

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Black Box

The predictions have been fulfilled under the complete lack of interest of the Administrations, which have preferred to look the other way while allowing continuous and systematic violence. The term “chabola” (shanty town) is defined by the Pan-Hispanic Dictionary as: “Poorly constructed substandard housing that is usually built in suburban areas and lacks the basic services required”, its etymology comes from the French geôle (cell, prison) through the Basque txabola. The French term comes from the Latin caveolla, which is a diminutive of cavea, meaning cell, cage. And in part, it is also what shantytowns become for the people who are forced to live in them, cages of constant precariousness that mark and determine their possibilities and rights to have a dignified life and work. These camps of temporary workers and their precarious housing appear in different parts of the Spanish geography, with some spots in Huelva, Murcia, Lleida and Almeria standing out. As a visual device, they resemble the packages that migrants themselves transport from one territory to another with their belongings, images that are repeated at borders such as Ceuta and Morocco.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed how the inequalities of an unjust system that were already here, but which by force majeure have become more visible, have increased. When curfews brought cities to a standstill, we still saw riders with their bicycles back and forth, delivering quickly those orders that we seemed to need so urgently. On the other hand, when social distance and open spaces were imposed, the temporary workers inhabited settlements that did not meet the minimum conditions under the passivity of the competent authorities with racist strategies, which organizations and collectives have begun to combat. The violation of human rights that has been going on for more than twenty years in these areas has only increased due to the social and health crisis. We could reflect on some elements that this situation forces us to look closely at and that should not be forgotten once it has passed: the gro wing inequality of the capitalist system, the precariousness of working conditions and housing problems. We could say that the combination of these elements is reflected in various groups of people, but if there are people who personify all three, it is the temporary workers and the riders.

Parallel to this is the simultaneous reality that mirrors what this package means, in which the same logics of exploitation and domination of the migrant are reproduced, a precariousness that is assumed to be contemporary but which in practice is contemporary, the rider. One of the main and characteristic means of production of this home delivery service for digital platforms is a large thermal backpack that resembles a bulky package. The last few years have also been very turbulent for these riders from companies such as Glovo or Deliveroo. For some time now, trade unions have

Spread throughout the peninsula, the collection campaigns in the fields have become constant sources of inequality and precariousness. In 1997, the General Workers’ Union published a report in which it warned that the lack of housing would lead to an increase in the number of people living on the streets and would eventually force the creation of shanty towns and settlements as the only housing solution. 41


been warning of the precariousness and bad practices of these companies and the problem that the figure of the false self-employed was going to cause. The support of the different trade unions, added to the deaths of some of the workers, such as that of the 22-year-old in Barcelona on 26 May 2019 or the most recent one, which occurred in Madrid on 9 February 2021, have generated all kinds of protests, one of the most shocking being the one that took place in Barcelona with the burning of the backpacks. An image with a strong impact that has led us to reflect on fire as an ambivalent tool, as a possible element from which to express the anger and weariness at the constant precariousness of the riders, faced with long working days, in a model that forces you to work long hours in order to live, in conditions with no guarantees or protection against occupational hazards and accidents. But fire can also become an element of expulsion, such as the constant burning of temporary workers’ settlements. At least one fire has been registered every six months in the Lepe settlement near the municipal cemetery, and these have been used to carry out the expulsion of the temporary workers. Some municipalities and autonomous communities have decided to demolish some of these settlements and then fence them off, without offering any alternative housing. Terms such as precarity, precariousness or precarious work have become more important, perhaps initially more prevalent in activism. Judith Butler, inspired by Michel Foucault, reflected in Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence on the possibility of resistance to the productive power of precarity and how the very conditions of precarity can contain the potential to recognize our re-

lation to others and provide a position in which we can embrace each other’s vulnerability and create an alliance of bodies. Guy Standing in his essay published in 2011 The Precariat. The New Dangerous Class, begins with a series of questions, one of them being crucially “Where is precarity taking us?”. The numerous violations that these realities signify in terms of human dignity, children’s rights and violence against women temporary workers and riders have made us consider the political and radical importance of activating this work. We connect both imaginaries as a starting point for this research that addresses urban phenomena in crisis in order to trigger questions and establish dialogues that question them. The historical review of both issues, built from a work of newspaper archives and research, has led us to the need to generate a work that allows us to put the reality of these migrant precariousness in crisis. From this, we have created a housing device that reflects on the condition of life of the temporary/unregulated worker together with a lifestyle that has been disguised behind the concept of the entrepreneur and the adventurer, within a neoliberal and atomized labor system. In an ironic reflection on housing as a product of the market, we try to construct a fake, which is not so far from reality, where the shack has become a commodity that can be marketed through the same platforms of sale and circulation that are behind the exploitation of the precarious migrant. On this occasion, the work is auctioned on the buying and selling platform Ebay, bringing a conceptual circularity to the project. In addition to the creation of this “house-package” that is accompanied by an assembly manual with a strong ironic charge, the work has a series of elements that customize this con42


tradictorily inhabitable space. Seven watercolors and a table made with the signage of the entrance to Spain as part of the European Union are part of the sale and staging of this device. In addition, it is accompanied by some counter-advertising banners that have been produced with texts that derive from Mike Davis’ phrase “housing is a verb”, combining it with different verbs associated with the reality that we have tackled. The activation of this set has a continuity in time through its circulation in the public space. Because this project, more than a housing response, has been thought of as an instrument of interpellation on the precarious living conditions of these groups and their reproductive elements, with the package as an element with a strong symbolic charge that in some way dominates the iconography of the migrant. This mirror centred on the package opens up cracks and fissures from which to establish dialogues between realities that are not directly connected, but which stem from the same logics of power that define a story. The imaginary of the package they carry and inhabit becomes a constant in the reality of migrants who travel on a journey of expulsion and subjugation that drives them to live in a condition of transience and permanent nomadism. Their content is their continent to the point of inhabiting it in a symbolically perverse production. With this critical design, we wanted to put on the table the problems derived from the systematic abandonment of vulnerable populations in a context of illegal exploitation of temporary workers, the precarious living conditions and the episodes of expulsion that have taken place as a result of the burning of these camps and what lies behind it, racism and continued invisibilisation. We are interested in the

term Black Box, and hence the title of the work and the project, because of the social process that the very notion of the black box implies. The one that starts from the ways in which the system and the people who suffer from it have been affected by the invisibilisation that financial or economic success itself produces, because the complexities that inhabit the interior of this success are not analyzed. Only the benefits that derive from it are analyzed. Black Box’s idea is based on how people can forget the inner processes of things as we begin to assimilate them through everyday use over time, which is precisely what has been happening to riders and temporary workers in our daily lives.

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Assembly manual for the “Black Box” package house

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Assembly manual for the “Black Box” package house

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Action in the public space

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Action in the public space

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Collection of watercolors by Fernando Ossandón Zubieta

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Collection of watercolors by Fernando Ossandón Zubieta

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Collection of watercolors by Fernando Ossandón Zubieta

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Kit of pennants for the customization of the “Black Box” house-package.

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Kit of pennants for the customization of the “Black Box” house-package.

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Kit of pennants for the customization of the “Black Box” house-package.

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Kit of pennants for the customization of the “Black Box” house-package.

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Action in the public space

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Presentation of the research process and results of the “Black Box” project at the Espacio de Todo

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Preparation of “completos caseros chilenos” for the presentation of “Black Box” at Espacio de Todo

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Presentation of the research process and results of the “Black Box” project at the Espacio de Todo

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Presentation of the research process and results of the “Black Box” project at the Espacio de Todo

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Billboard of the “Black Box” project located in the front of the Espacio de Todo

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Otro(s)ures

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OTRO(S)URES (Other(s)ouths) A research and production residency in which the aim is to develop a collective work process to generate a common work between a visual artist, a transdisciplinary researcher and an international curator. One of the objectives of establishing this relationship is to dismantle the hierarchical relationship that exists between the agents linked to the field of contemporary art. As a collective work, we want to promote a reading that puts in tension the concept of the global south from the political aesthetic discourse, intersubjectively connecting the experience and knowledge of the three participants. This includes a process that is permanently open to other artistic agents in order to activate their development and results. For this first edition, held between 15 November and 15 December 2021, we invited the artist and transdisciplinary researcher Guillermina Mongan (ARG), the international curator Carolina Chacón (COL) and the visual artist Glenda Zapata (BOL). We also had the collaboration of the independent organisation FelipaManuela a space for research residencies where two of the guests stayed and where we also held some meetings with local agents.

Museo de Antioquia between 2013 and 2019 (Medellín). She is a member of the transfeminist and decolonial research platform Frente Sudaka. Guillermina Mongan. Argentina. She is an art historian (FdA-UNLP), teacher, researcher, curator and artist. She is a member of the research, discussion and collective position Platform from Latin America, Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms Network) and the curatorial research collective Frente Sudaka. Since 2012 she has been a member of the group Serigrafistas Queer, where she also coordinates its ASK archive, and since 2016 of Cromoactivismo. She researches and produces both individually and collectively around the methodologies, narratives and performativities of artistic research, artisticpolitical practices and the archive as a space for experimenting with narratives and memories.

Glenda Zapata: Born in La Paz-Bolivia, she studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts, then attended workshops in photography, performance, cataloguing of cultural property and is currently studying forensic anthropology in Madrid. Her work interrogates and investigates mortality from multiple perspectives and delves into people in adverse situations. Carolina Chacón Bernal. Colombia. Curator, artist, teacher and researcher. Master’s degree in Contemporary Art History and Visual Culture (UCM, Spain). Her work is developed from anti-racist, decolonial and gender perspectives in specific contexts. Her recent projects have addressed the relationship between contemporary art practices and communities of meaning that intervene in museum narratives. She was assistant curator at the 63


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NO ES FRONTERA NI EL ACENTO NI LA PIEL (NEITHER ACCENT NOR SKIN IS A BORDER)

different types of death and mourning that migrants go through; and on the circulation and production of visual images that have historically been deployed from the hegemonic representations of coloniality and their continuities in contemporary visuality, as well as in the exercise of symbolic violence towards migrant and racialised bodies.

One of the first things that went through this residency was the recognition of the differences in our own particular accents, concerns, languages and ways of doing things in order to arrive at common processes and questions in terms of a collective project. Then came the search for the way in which the above could be articulated with the question of the other south, with the territories from which each one of us comes, as well as our different migratory conditions that brought us together in the Spanish state.

The fruit of this process was an open and continuous archive that can be extended collaboratively, contemplating sound and visual records that dislocate and subvert the hegemonic narratives of the colonial order. In this context, we also include a commemorative gesture, an obituary published in the newspaper El País, offering condolences to the families of undocumented immigrants who died in Spain.

Through the questions: How does structural racism continue to be perpetuated? What happens to undocumented immigrants from Latin America who die in Spanish territory? What mourning do migrants and racialised people experience? What strategies do we find to sustain language, to insist on our own voice? We imagine the space of the Otro(s)ures residency as a refuge from which to build alliances with migrant and racialised collectives and people from Latin America, considering their contributions to the production of counterhegemonic narratives and actions.

Stories, voices We set out to collaboratively collect counter-narratives that would produce a broader picture of the situation of migrants in Madrid. But how to access the stories of the transients who inhabit Madrid’s marginalised streets, in the geographic and symbolic south of Madrid, spaces mostly relegated to migrants? All that is needed is to create a space for them to speak, for them to have a voice.

These complex questions marked a possible working route: research on the fate and whereabouts of the bodies of undocumented migrants; on the

Suddenly, the flow of indignation begins to flow by itself, the indignation that has been fed with each day of 65


outrage for the mere fact of living in a country that is not one’s own and for laws that want to expel them/us from their streets at every moment.

es to the families of the people who died in Spanish territories and whose bodies are not available, after their families did not have the economic or legal means to access the repatriation of their bodies. A Christian (Latin) cross accompanied the announcement, not only to maintain the form of the vast majority of obituaries in Latin America, but as a way of pointing out the ideological continuum since the conquest and its prolongation of coloniality through religion.

Their voices are a complaint, a claim, a cry for justice. When we ask the man who attends the neighbourhood shop if, after 15 years, he wants to return home; when we ask the lady who looks after the elderly or a person whose friend died without documents and does not know where he is to leave flowers, if he has felt racism, they answer with a capital YES. These and other stories of other migration experiences tell, on the one hand, how helpless so many people are in the face of migration laws that expose them to situations of extreme vulnerability, and on the other hand, the resistance that, as a survival strategy, embraces other forms of mourning and being together.

Such a message did not go unnoticed by one of the most widely read newspapers in Spain. After paying the cost of the publication and sending the text of the obituary, an official of the newspaper contacted us to ask who we were and to whom exactly it was addressed. His interrogation and our answers were recorded in an audio that we kept as a testimony of the surveillance that operates on bodies that live under constant suspicion. We extended this gesture to Vallecas, at the front of the Espacio de Todo (Space of All), which is the industrial building of Todo por la Praxis, our host space and collective. The question “What happens to undocumented immigrants from Latin America who die in Spanish territory?” was extended to the public visual space in the south of Madrid, making more evident the void of answers and the ritual need for a collective mourning.

Obituary The lack of answers to the question about the bodies of undocumented migrants who have died on Spanish territory has made us feel the need to amplify the question to other migrants, as well as to a sphere of society that has been indifferent to their response. One of our gestures consisted of inserting an obituary in the Spanish newspaper El País, which circulated in the printed edition in Madrid on 9 December 2021, offering condolenc66


Anarchiving and images Voices: Dagmary Olívar, Valentina Silva, Nicolás Koralsky, Bernardo Nvinic, Juan, Marlene, Juan Carlos, Nancy, María Collado, Andrés Pinto, Abdiel Segarra, Carolina Bustamante and Miranda Porras Bustamante.

How do we imagine futures by performing images and narratives from the South? How is the racism of those “first” images that produced the colonial discourse perpetuated in the present? These were the questions that also functioned as a starting point for tracing and circulating these counter-narratives, with the aim of collaboratively constructing a constantly growing visual essay. The images were received through different virtual media and collected from spaces such as the Museum of America, Prado Museum and Museum of Anthropology.

Feedback during the process: Mabel Tapia, Jesús Carrillo, Ale Simón, Diego del Pozo, Museo en Red from Reina Sofía Museum, Inland Campo Adentro.

In order to socialise these collective approaches to the questions and to share in many dimensions, we invited to the opening space all the people who accompanied us in the process and to whom we offered a very eclectic meal, linked to our countries of origin, which ended up becoming one of the most affective spaces of the residency. A moment in which we remembered that we were brought together by the need to abolish border systems, to refuse to understand skin and accent as borders, and that we would like to insist on imagining strategies where intimacy is produced as a gesture of the common. Acknowledgements Allies: FelipaManuela, La Parcería, Yo soy el Otrx. 67


Dinner with local agents at FelipaManuela, to open the investigation process.

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Food preparation at the presentation of “No es frontera ni el acento ni la piel” at Espacio de Todo.

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Presentation of the process and results of “No es frontera ni el acento ni la piel” at Espacio de Todo.

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Presentation of the process and results of “No es frontera ni el acento ni la piel” at Espacio de Todo.

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Presentation of the process and results of “No es frontera ni el acento ni la piel” at Espacio de Todo.

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Obituary published in the newspaper El País on December 9, 2021,

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Billboard of “No es frontera ni el acento ni la piel”, located at the front of the Espacio de Todo

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Techo sostenido

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TECHO SOSTENIDO (Roof supported) This is the name we have given to the only green space in the building, which is located on the roof, and which, after having built a structure there and several workshops to populate it with a garden, we have decided to activate as a place for research between art and nature, with experimental laboratories for artists and curators, which allow us to approach the notion of sustainability and rurality from the city. The residencies that take place in this space seek to experiment around agropolitan practices towards a reflection on food sovereignty. This in turn empowers the rooftop as a node that fosters dialogue and transcultural action under the premises of low/cost and low/technology. During the year 2021 and in a longterm residency that extends to 2022, this space hosts the project Siembre aquí! by curator Daniela Ruiz Moreno (UY-ARG), and artists Natalia Pilo-Pais (PER) and Ugo Martínez Lázaro (MEX).

ronto and has won prizes for drawing and engraving. His work continuously explores different plastic languages, from imitation to the conception of the main categories of traditional artistic practice. He is obsessed with creating hybrid objects with the utopian possibility of finding a language of his own in the world.

Natalia Pilo-Pais Figallo (Lima, Peru - 1984)She lives in Madrid. Visual artist focused mainly on creative direction and the creative process with a Masters in Philosophy with a major in Philosophical Anthropology as a complementary part of her creative research. She develops deep historical, social and geographical research, generating visual concepts through diverse media such as installation and photography. For her, the power of the image in our contemporaneity is motivation to search and generate questions in the observer.

Daniela Ruiz Moreno is an Argentinean curator based in Madrid. She holds a degree in Theory and History of Art at the University of Buenos Aires. Since 2013 she coordinates the International Artists in Residence Programme of the “Ace” Foundation. She was part of the Tate Exchange team at Tate Modern through the Brooks International Fellowship in 2019. She has participated as a curator in several international residencies. She is currently curating international projects in Taiwan and China. In Madrid she is the curator of the project Cuidadorxs Invisibles (Invisible caregivers - Art for Change, Fundación la ‘Caixa’ 2020) by artist Marta Fernández Calvo, focused on working with non-professional caregivers of people with degenerative diseases.

Ugo Martínez Lázaro Multidisciplinary artist, with training in the fields of architecture and Fine Arts. He arrived in Spain more than 10 years ago from Mexico. He has exhibited individually and collectively in Mexico, Barcelona, Seville, Zaragoza, Valencia and Madrid. His work has been shown at art fairs in cities such as Amsterdam and To77


Siembre aquí! (Sow Here!)

the obviousness that a displacement of place does not only imply a process of adaptation on a conscious and emotional level, but a process of integral transformation due to the new air we breathe, the new surfaces, the bodies we interact with and the food we eat.

In order to describe the will and needs behind the creation of the collective and project that is Siembre Aquí! (Sow Here!) I would like to start with a series of generalities:

Siembre Aquí! (Sow Here!), within the curatorship of PIPA! is a project that acts between these three axes: soils -migratory processes- products and habits of coexistence.

I. The dynamics of contemporary urban life in Madrid, and in a large number of western cities, are of maximum contact with asphalt floors and with whatever the floor of the room, flat or house where each one of us lives (wood, carpet, tile, etc.) In general, contacts with grassland or other types of soil are reduced to short moments of sport or leisure time.

In turn, Ecosophy as an ethical-conceptual approach and Permaculture as a way of linking with the land, with products and between living beings, function as approaches that enable this complementary integration between the three axes mentioned and open up different ways of thinking about ourselves as inhabitants of a city.

II. In the most fortunate migratory processes, we find ourselves with the possibility and need to ask ourselves about questions of belonging and rootedness. We are faced with the temporary melancholy of distance from the place we have left, whether the displacement has been voluntary or involuntary. The new ground we inhabit is subject to scrupulous analysis and comparisons with the ground we walked on before.

The Techo sostenido (Sustained Roof) of the Espacio de Todo (Space of All) functions as a structure of mutual recognition and welcome. With the long-term objective of growing edible and mythological plants in the cultivation structures already present in the space, we have had an initial period dedicated to the formation of a collective of artistic practices.

III. The products and habits generated from and with that soil form part of the new material with which we link ourselves and, therefore, the new material that shapes us. We thus understand

We take as a framework for exploration our diverse migratory experiences and in the process of recognising the land we now inhabit, we have also been prompted to investigate the past 78


forms of cultivation in Latin America as well as the present that coexist on both sides of the Atlantic. We are interested in having a link that is sustained by the complexity implied in the understanding of diverse coexisting presents such as the persistence of institutions that perpetuate a colonialist and extractivist link with nature, the different forms of domestication, as well as the recognition of societies and self-managed and/or resistance movements.

gardens in Madrid. We understand that the research process takes place in a constant movement from the Espacio de Todo (Space of All) and towards other organisations or collectives in the city, as well as in dialogue with specialists in Latin America. The Techo Sostenido (Sustained Roof) functions as a space of practice for the sublimation of all these findings and, within the critical research trajectory of Todo por la Praxis, it is understood as a ground for the testing of other forms of urbanism.

Following the above, simultaneously with the cultivation projections at Techo Sostenido (Sustained Roof), we propose to carry out a collective investigation in collaboration with the different communities related to these themes: community gardens in Madrid, independent seed bank projects, etc. At the same time, each artist is pursuing his or her own path of research and generation of works. On the one hand, Natalia Pilo-Pais, on the basis of studies of pre-columbian andean architecture, has generated designs and built flower beds following these syntheses, which in turn will be used for the cultivation in the Techo Sostenido (see images 1 and 2). Having transited archives in Spain and Peru, and taken his own photographs, Pilo-Pais is also generating a visual study of the types of plants present in both territories and their contexts of existence. Ugo Martínez Lázaro, for his part, is carrying out research on permaculture, from its theoretical approaches and from experiences in some community

Daniela Ruiz Moreno

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Image of Natalia Pilo-Pais Figallo’s research process.

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Image of Natalia Pilo-Pais Figallo’s research process.

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Image of Ugo Martínez Lázaro’s research process.

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Image of the Techo Sostenido located on the roof of the Espacio de Todo

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IDYS INSTITUTO DO IT YOURSELF

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Instituto do it yourself (IDYS) (Do it yourself institute)

we had been working with for years. This is one of the driving forces of the neighborhood movement in the city, which made possible the processes of social, neighborhood and urban transformation in the eighties. It is currently a neighborhood that concentrates a large amount of social and activist capital from these neighborhood movements. The work carried out in this first phase of the space was linked to neighborhood organizations, social movements, youth associations, schools and secondary schools in the neighborhood. Work was carried out in processes where the community built collectively around its needs in a learning environment.

“The intention of schooling and critical pedagogy must be linked to the problem of developing a new public sphere. That is, the task of radical educators must be organized around the establishment of ideological and material conditions that would enable women and men of oppressed classes to assert their own voices. This would lead to the development of a critical discourse that would enable the insertion of a collective interest in the reconstruction of a wider society”. Henry Giroux Our experiences as a collective in projects such as Campo de Cebada, Esta una Plaza, Antonio Grilo, Cinema Usera and many other processes, raised the need to find a space or ecosystem where to connect the projects and learning acquired. In many of these cases we found methodological connections, similar research, replicable practices, communicating people and intermingled processes that we thought it was important to finish hybridizing from a position of critical pedagogy. On the other hand, we found the need to generate a network from which to connect knowledge, share knowledge and enable interconnection between the different experiences. This is how the Instituto do it yourself (IDYS) (Do It Yourself Institute) was started, a place where projects and processes could be connected to the knowledge acquired, allowing direct learning in connection with citizen initiatives and actions.

This articulated and shaped our current pedagogical model that underpins IDYS, no longer as a space in itself, but as a working platform within the Space of Everything, based on the combination of collaborative methodologies, learning communities and transversal capacities. These in turn create spaces in which distributed, transparent and horizontal learning takes place. Experience is promoted as a common thread where difficulties and knowledge are shared, as well as other elements that arise. In turn, this method has two lines of work: Learning by doing and Doing it together. Both consist of generating processes by creating and doing things with others in a collaborative way, generating ways of relating through collective work, and sharing successes and mistakes as part of the learning process. Based on these ideas, the construction of consensus and common imaginaries is promoted through co-design: a process of creation that represents the values and interests of the participating community, from the very lan-

In our search for options to physically house this proposal, in 2015 we found an industrial building in Vallecas that connected us with a neighborhood 85


guages with which they identify; and the collective construction of devices, facilitated by designs that allow the development of skills and capacities. An open configuration that includes the greatest number of diverse agents, installing a more distributed learning framework that enhances the social and cultural transformations that these processes motivate.

cational community. To this end, we have proposed non-formal learning processes, with a proposal of radical pedagogy that is inserted into a formal education programme to open cracks of critical thinking inserted in the institution itself, and consequently in the students. School playgrounds are one of the most important inter-relational and socialization spaces for children and young people, who spend many hours of their year and of their lives in them. Their design influences, conditions and shapes the type of relationships that take place in them, facilitating or hindering certain power dynamics, hierarchies, conflicts and pedagogical developments among the people who use them.

Furthermore, it is proposed that this construction of devices and actions should be open source, with the process and results being freely available to the community for use, enabling instances of peer-to-peer knowledge transfer between the different agents involved in the projects. Since 2018, this practice has shifted towards educational environments. On the one hand, there is an interest from groups working in public spaces towards these more institutional spaces, and on the other hand, we visualize the need to rethink school playgrounds, which to date are still mostly deficient in terms of quality. Thus, we have set ourselves the objective of promoting school environments based on the principles of equality and nondiscrimination, redefining these environments towards cooperative spaces and favoring activities that encourage a more autonomous context for the pupils. This allows them to promote different types of activities, at different levels and intensities, and to reduce or eliminate structures that generate power relations and exclusion.

These have been built for some time from standardized and economistic approaches in which savings in their construction and maintenance seem to have been their main design guide. As a result, they are currently presented as spaces dominated by concrete, lacking vegetation, shade and climatic comfort, and lacking in elements and furniture that allow for different configurations for rest and interpersonal relations, as well as variety in their uses, such as play and the construction of critical thinking. It is symptomatic to see that a large majority of courtyards establish centrality around the sports courts, subordinating the rest of the possible uses to their periphery. From architecture, specifically from tactical urbanism, some experiences have been developed to try to respond to the growing questioning of the educational environment. Nowadays, small-scale actions are proliferating and there is a growing awareness of

This implies new ways of promoting transformation through processes of active participation, as well as new models for generating knowledge that facilitate appropriation and a sense of belonging on the part of the edu86


the importance of transforming school spaces. What we seek to do is to pay attention not only to how students want to learn and what they want to learn, but above all where they want to learn and how involved they are in creating those spaces. We want to focus not only on what is transmitted, but also on the architecture of these transmissions, to consider these spaces as a third teacher capable of containing pedagogical actions in their use. Todo por la Praxis

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Images of the courtyard co-design process at IES Pedro Salinas.

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Images of the collective construction processes at IES Pedro Salinas.

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Results of the co-design process of collective constructions at IES Pedro Salinas.

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Results of the co-design and collective construction process at Hipatia school

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Results of the co-design and collective construction process at Hipatia school

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Results of the co-design process and collective constructions of the Hipatia school

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RECIPES 2021

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RECIPE “UN GRITO EN LA CALLE” (A SHOUT IN THE STREET) Fideuà de verduras (Vegetable fideuà) A large paella pan for 15 people. For the end of the residency and because there was a paella pan in the space, I decided to make a dish that we cook a lot at home, near Tarragona, my birthplace and where I currently live. Fideuà is a dish cooked by my father, from whom I inherited the recipe. Ingredients: - Onion - Green pepper - Green asparagus - Mushrooms - Artichokes - 2 or 3 grated tomatoes - Garlic - Alioli - 2Lt. of vegetable stock - 1kg of thin noodles Preparation: Make a stir-fry of onion, tomato, pepper and garlic. We add the vegetables we want, finely chopped: mushrooms, asparagus, artichokes or others depending on the season. And now the never-before-unveiled family secret: add two spoonfuls of the aioli to the sofrito. On top of this, add the noodles (better if they are not too fat) and fry them until golden brown, and then add the vegetable stock until the noodles are covered. Correct if there is not enough stock. Cook so that the stock evaporates a little (it does not have to be soupy) and the noodles are well cooked. Cooking time will depend on the thickness of the noodles. You can finish by baking in the oven, so that the noodles stand up.

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RECIPE “BLACK BOX” Completos caseros chilenos (hot dogs) 40 people For the opening of the process, we wanted to prepare this meal because in Iquique, a city in the north of Chile, serious xenophobic violence was happening against migrants living in the streets, one of the strongest was the burning of all their belongings. This street food, called completo, is very popular in this territory due to the variety of sauces with which they are prepared. Ingredients: For the completos - 10 avocados (known in Chile as paltas) - 3 kg of tomatoes - 40 frankfurter sausages - 40 bakery hot dog buns - 1 jar of sauerkraut (optional) - 1 jar of pickle mince (optional) - 1 jar of mustard - 1 jar of ketchup - Olive oil - Salt For the sauces - 3 eggs - 1 lt vegetable oil - 1 clove of garlic - 1 jar of kalamata olives (in Chile, olives from Azapa) - 1 whole onion - 1 bunch of coriander - 4 lemons - Olive oil - Salt

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Preparation of the completos: Chop the tomato into cubes, season them with salt and olive oil, leave them in a serving dish. Mash the avocado and leave at least one stone in it so that it does not turn black, add salt and also leave in a serving dish. Optional add a few drops of lemon juice which also prevents the avocado from turning black. Put the sauerkraut in a serving dish as well as the pickle mince. Boil the viennoiseries for 5 minutes in a pan of boiling water. At the same time, heat the bread in the oven for 3 minutes at 200°. Do not leave them in the oven any longer so that they do not get too crispy. Preparation of the sauces: - Normal mayonnaise In a blender jug (minipimer in Chile), add the whole egg, salt to taste and put the blender on. With the blender in, add 300 ml of vegetable oil. Activate the mixer without moving it from its place until the mayo sets. Once it is ready, turn it up and down until it has the right texture. Then add the set of half a large lemon, or a small whole lemon. Whisk again. Once ready, transfer to a serving bowl. - Olive mayonnaise Repeat the preparation of the normal mayonnaise, but once ready, add 15 or 20 kalamata olives to taste. - Garlic mayonnaise Repeat the preparation of the normal mayonnaise, but once ready, add a clove of garlic at the end (or more, depending on the desired intensity). - Green sauce Chop the onion into very fine cubes, then chop the coriander just as finely. Mix, add the juice of one lemon, olive oil and salt. The quantities of onion and coriander should be proportional so that the sauce is uniform. How to serve: Once the preparations are ready, place everything on a table. They can be served by whoever is offering the meal or for each diner to serve their own, choosing which ingredients to add and which not to add. - Classic completo Open a slit in the bread, not too deep so that it does not open completely, add the 98


vienna, tomato and salsa verde. You can add the sauces of your choice, as well as mustard and ketchup. - Italian completo Open a slit in the bread, not too deep so that it does not open completely, add the vienna, tomato and avocado. You can add the sauces of your choice, as well as the mustard and ketchup. - Dynamic completo Open a slit in the bread, not too deep so that it does not open completely, add the vienna, tomato, sauerkraut, minced meat and avocado. You can add the sauces of your choice, as well as mustard and ketchup. As a Chilean, the most vivid memory I have of this food as a child was the reward my mother would give me when I behaved well at the doctor’s. This consisted of taking me to a traditional tea room to be served with a cup of tea. My favourite was always the dynamic one, and I also enjoyed it a lot at my friends’ birthday celebrations. Then, in my youth, it was a must for going out to a party, having one before or after the party in a street cart. Jo Muñoz

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RECIPE “NO ES FRONTERA NI EL ACENTO NI LA PIEL” (NEITHER ACCENT NOR SKIN IS A BORDER) For the opening of the process, we decided to make “psychedelic Apthapi”, several recipes from our own territories, a symbolic way of sharing knowledge and culinary memories to put them in common. This is why each of us prepared a dish, with the collaboration of those who attended. Each dish could in turn be combined and complemented with the rest according to the preferences of the diners. Salsa de maní (Peanut sauce) This dish reminds me a lot of my grandmothers, of my family, as we used to eat it frequently, it is simple and a delicious vegetarian option for those who don’t eat meat. Ingredients - 1 cup roasted peanuts - Red or yellow chili powder (to taste) - Water - Salt Place the peanuts in a container, cover with water and leave to soak for at least 15 minutes to soften. Then add salt and chilli pepper to taste and grind to form a homogeneous paste, adding water as required until the desired texture is reached. This sauce is typical of Huancaína potatoes in Bolivia (in Peru the same dish exists but it is different). It consists of boiled potatoes on a bed of lettuce, which are covered with abundant peanut sauce, accompanied by pieces of fresh cheese, hard-boiled egg, tomato and black olives. Glenda Zapata Arepas con queso (Arepas with cheese) Recipe for 70 arepas. Arepas are round corn dough, stuffed or not, roasted, fried or baked. Many worlds and temporalities in one meal. Its origin is pre-Hispanic, corn as the staple food of the ancestral peoples of Abya Yala. Later, with the arrival of the Spaniards and with them the cows, cheese was added. It is known by the name of “arepa” mainly 101


in Venezuela and Colombia, countries with a long migratory relationship that has intensified in recent years. Ingredients: 3 ½ kilos of corn flour 1 kilo approx. of grated cheese (Mozzarella and Latin cheese) Salt to taste 1000 gr. cow’s butter lukewarm wáter Preparation: In a large bowl or on a wooden surface, add warm water to the flour slowly until all the flour is wet, but not too wet or too dry. Melt the butter in the water beforehand. Gradually add the salt and taste the dough. Knead for at least 1 hour, then put the dough in the fridge and knead again the next day for another 40 minutes until the dough is homogeneous. The sign that the dough is ready is that it does not stick to your hands. Then, between several people, we make balls so that, flattened, they give the final size and thickness of the arepa. Other people flatten the dough into a ball until it is about 12 cm in diameter, put the grated cheese in the centre and close it so that it does not come out while they are roasting, moulding it at the same time into the rounded and flattened shape of the arepa. We grill them over medium heat with a little butter until they are golden brown. This recipe is one of the many ways my parents have prepared arepas for as long as I can remember. As they roast, their smell reminds me of home. Carolina Chacón Bernal Parrillada (Barbecue) We made the barbecue at home with loose cobblestones from the street in my city, La Plata. We used to go out by car to look for them. It was quite an adventure to go out at night in the car in search of those little pieces of stone that we kept in the boot. Today there are hardly any cobblestone streets left. They are not very sticky, they say, and people complain that they ruin their cars. Not everyone likes to shake it up, I liked it. Once there were enough of them to make an H (in depth) with them, we abandoned our nightly outings, but a new stage began, that of seeing how, with them, the place for the barbecue where I would learn to grill was set up in the middle of the garden. 102


My old man was a fan of barbecues, he liked to do them at weekends, as a time to stop the pace of work, to meet friends, family, in a slow flow of time, almost always accompanied by red wine. He was the one who taught me when I was little to keep the fire burning, which is one of the most beautiful memories I have of him, of making little balls with the city newspaper (which I no longer read), of gathering twigs to wrap them around the paper (like a teepee), first the smallest ones, then the medium-sized ones. The grill we made for the Otro(s)ures residence had a different materiality, but with the same beauty of the procedure. It was built by looking for materials in different places in Madrid. It’s a more mobile version, here in Argentina you see it a lot in street stalls (on the roads, at the exit of concerts, football matches). It was made with a “200 litre tank” among many, in TXP’s workshop, at the same time as some of us were learning the trade of welding. The tank and the enthusiasm made us enough to make two. With small pieces of wood that we collected from a container, a small bag of charcoal and a lot of smoke, we lit our two grills. On them we made our “psychedelic Apthapi” in which arepas, roasted vegetables and butterfly choripanes coexisted in a great ritual full of sauces and shared words. Ingredients: - Beef, pork, chicken, chorizo or other products for the grill depending on what you want to eat and the number of diners. - Vegetables cut in such a way that they do not fall through the slots of the grill. Brushed with oil, ground chilli, sweet paprika and lemon. - Coarse salt - Chimichurri Preparation: - Make small balls of paper, gather thin and medium-sized twigs, ideal if there are small trunks. Distribute them in such a way that they wrap around the paper (like a tepee), first the thinner ones and then the medium ones. - Light the fire with more than one match on different sides of the mini teepee until you hear the crackling of the wood. Until it “catches fire” and then just put some mini logs and a few coals so that the embers start to glow. - If for some reason the fire is low, there is always a piece of newspaper left over to act as a fan. - Then you have to add charcoal and/or wood in quantity until you can make an evenly scattered ember on which to heat whatever you want to share as food. 103


- It is recommended to always keep a small piece of fire in a corner of the grill to obtain more embers. - The distance between the ember and the grill should always be at a height of the ember where the heat is felt, measured with the hands (as when we put them on the cooker to warm them up). It is preferable to cook slowly. - All the food is salted before being put on the fire. - Once the embers are spread out, place the meat and vegetables on them. Bear in mind that some things cook faster than others. One option is to put what cooks slower first, or the other is to eat in batches. - Everything should be placed on one side and on the other. - Once the food has been removed from the grill, it can be spread with chimichurri, a typical Argentinean dressing that is very easy to make: fresh parsley leaves (chopped), oregano, a couple of crushed cloves of garlic, spoonfuls of white vinegar, spoonfuls of oil, a teaspoon of chilli or ground chilli, salt and pepper to taste, all in a small jar. Guillermina Mongan

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