Preface
Jorge Sosa
Trueque is a compilation of documents about the relationships between eight persons and different public markets located in Mexico City, London, Rio de Janeiro, New York, Berlin and Copenhagen. Each contributor recorded his experiences, making use of photographs, notes, text, audio or drawings, with the intention of sharing this material with other members of the project. From my perspective, the experiences gathered in this publication throw us some clues and create entry points to scrutinize the social, economic, and political issues of these cities. I chose the public markets as detonators to foster dialogues about the markets’ symbiotic relationships and metabolic processes, and the survival as part of their character and how their natures cause breaks in the popular interpretation. I think street markets are areas of uncertainty, fertile spaces for thinking about how we build our local and global awareness. They are uncontrollable sights and are vaporous, although sometimes they are blind spots in the aspirational landscape. They are also areas where alternative versions of everyday reality have shipwrecked or have been consolidated. The public market is one story, or many, which gives effect and meaning to the more complex cultural resistance, although it is a part of the most unfair economic and political machinery. Trueque is a participatory, autonomous, nonprofit project, whose sole purpose is to share and disseminate various contemporary cultural phenomena.
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