Extracts from the MADRID_ABIERTO Urban Buddy Scheme sessions
5th OF FEBRUARY OF 2009
Cecilia Andersson and Jorge Díez (presentation of seminar and Madrid Abierto 2009)
Javier Duero (moderator)
Basurama (Javier Duero presents + conference)
Andrés Jaque (Javier Duero presents + conference)
Ludotek (Javier Duero presents + conference)
Wunderkammer (conference)

JORGE DÍEZ OPENS THE SESSIONS
… since 2003, for five years, annually, interventions in the city are taking place and since 2007, at the same time, we organize our meetings, debate sessions, with specialists interested in public space and participating artists… to put things in common, comparing projects and proposals…

… until 2007, when we decided to create a consulting committee with some of the participating people or that had intervened as curators in MADRID ABIERTO… Cecilia Andersson, Ramón Parramón (director of Idensitat) with a longer and more interesting career in the field of open space interventions in Spain, Fito Rodríguez (with participation of the Montehermoso Cultural Centre)… and we created an audiovisual section… done with the collaboration of Canal Metro and last year as part of Casa Encendida’s programme …
… we will also have Guillón Sanz, María Inés Rodríguez and the Democracia Group, curators of the previous edition…
…this committee had worked on MADRID ABIERTO’s model and introduced different ways of artist selection, the curator’s participation… and how to advance…

We decided to do the next edition in a two year period, to have more time… and with today’s start, the selected artists and groups, artists and architects of Madrid, could discuss matters with less stress, developing projects and having more time (for them) and more guarantees to manage city permits (which are always so complicated) to make them happen.

We also thought publishing the works, which annual editions couldn’t provide, and we started by editing, collecting 55 projects produced in these years and incorporating texts… it’s this big book. There are few copies,… a good working tool.
… we use these days to discuss and learn…
… we would like to thank Alberto Sanjuán Benito (Altadis Foundation) who has just retired, for his support since the first edition, we lose a great protector…

CECILIA ANDERSSON, CURATOR OF MADRID ABIERTO, TAKES THE FLOOR
… how I have thought this edition should be, now in a new format; with more time to develop projects…
To me, not being Spanish, MADRID ABIERTO has to be something for the city’s residents. Thus I have contacted a lot of people that live here, inviting them to present their works... it’s a gesture for those who come from abroad, to do their projects, and learn about Madrid, which would take longer otherwise… they are willing to share their knowledge of the city… something that is very important when working on public issues, to work with the city’s information to develop ideas and projects…
That’s why I have named it URBAN BUDDY SCHEME, concept that we haven’t been able to translate… but it involves the idea that today artistic practices integrate several practices, entwining with many disciplines… I want to create links with the city, these can’t be created, but we can offer a platform, this session, to introduce people to each other…

…that’s why now we will do a ‘speakxxxx’, to introduce a lot of people, successive introductions to those we haven’t met before, changing every four minutes…every time I make the bells ring…we will try…
Also, on Saturday at noon we will develop a ‘one to one’ session, to question the experts that appear in this list hung on the wall, an efficient way to know Madrid…
Lets start talking to one another, let’s know each other.

JAVIER DUERO OPENS THE 1ST DEBATE SESSION WITH A LONG INTERVENTION
…we begin by swiftly expressing a few ideas, a few thoughts on our working context which is Madrid…this edition’s novelties, on theoretical reflection, on the way in which we are going to work these days, for we have a new work model for this edition…as you can see we have given you candy for the brain, we have functioned as adults but using adolescent or children’s practices…
…a new form of managing our professional capital, invited to think in a critical way, acting within social commitment with the territory, in a horizontal, democratic and transparent way…we encourage you to learn and teach, to share knowledge…although being positioned in this totally hierarchical scenery, knowledge will not leave this session, but we will share it…this is an ephemeral scenery that will last only this afternoon.

This interesting work method defuses two control and power mechanisms…the institution/curator and curator/artist or artistic group relationship. That is, I consider that the institution VS civil society hierarchy and the role of the traditional curator are clarified… the curator becomes a cultural interface that doesn’t legitimize people or discourses. This has an enormous transcendence in a city like this, with its institutional relevance as the country’s capital city.
This happens in Madrid, a city with great resources that has grown incredibly in the last 15 years, being Spain’s first economy, with the country’s highest GDP and one of Europe’s highest.

It’s important to locate where we come from, where we are building our project, where it’s taking place…also highlight the years’ delay in our sustainable cultural production model, show the brutal asymmetry that has existed between artists and institution/public administration… thus this year’s model for MADRID ABIERTO is a great novelty and somewhat transgressor, in the sense of inviting organizations and groups that work in the fabric, in that ‘underground’ that exists in the margins of institutional circuits.
…Cecilia, who is Swedish, knows PIMFORUN(¡) (I’d like to dwell on this), an example…the first company or platform (created in the fifties) to watch Swedish cinema, in the 70’s became an production/distribution company for experimental cinema and video-art…to define where it’s at, in today’s Madrid there doesn’t exist any experimental film or video-art distributor, we don’t even have mediatecs…to any curator or researcher that wished to know what is being done in this field…I won’t dwell on the subject, you all amply know it.
Currently all of Madrid’s problems are well known and the solutions are in process. We have to be optimistic, especially after the generational shift that has taken place in the administration’s every level, most of all as new profile art managers emerge, with a new spirit and a will to comprehend what cultural production is.

In this year, 2009, four initiatives converge in Madrid…the first of which would be “MADRID ABIERTO”, a critical research project on the territory, the city…and how we, civil society, interact, think and act upon it, this would be a civil society’s general context related to its territory…
…a second project would be “Map Madrid”, an initiative by the ‘2 de mayo’ Art Centre, in Mostoles, which intends to create a cartography, a ‘mapping’ of the whole of Madrid’s cultural scene, the associative and cultural mediation fabric separate from institutions and the market. A work group will do it along the year.
…a third project would be “Madrid’s creators’ archive”, although it sounds incredible, it’s the first time an archive is made in which, through selection, 120 artists will be reflected on at the end of the year with profuse data on their projects and work…it will travel through different cities to make these artists known. One of the main problems for Madrid’s artists is their limited international visibility…some ‘mobility grants’ have been created to improve this, a lot more has to be done…
And the fourth project is “Web2.o Project”, an initiative of ARCO and the Vocento publishing House. Through an open call they have created research computing and programming teams, to create a semantic Website to identify and structure the market and industry aspects related to sales, production and distribution of art works, most of all galleries and distributors.

Everything is changing very fast in Madrid’s cultural sector…in this MADRID ABIERTO we also encourage this new way of handling things.

Before presenting these groups it is important to say that participants are art groups that function as work groups and committed social activists that work together and have developed collaborative activities into professional strategies and have almost established a philosophy of life.

The first group is “Basurama”…a group that is dedicated to research and art management since 2001 and has focused on production processes, the residues they produce and the creative possibilities that this contemporary juncture arouses. Originated in Madrid’s Faculty of Architecture, it has evolved and adopted new forms since it begun, it wants to study phenomena inherent to the massive production of factual and virtual garbage in consumer society; providing new perspectives to act as generators of thought and attitude, it finds cracks in generative and consumer processes, establishing questions not only to our way of exploiting resources but also to our way of thinking, working and perceiving reality…
Basurama carries out activities, projections, workshops, conferences, contests and edits publications. They also intend to establish a platform to create interactions between agents of the social and cultural fabric.
They have worked in Brussels, San Sebastián, Sao Paulo, Linz and Caracas, their headquarters are in Madrid.
Of all their projects I would emphasize “You throw away almost everything you buy” in which they carried out different activities and actions in several cities between September and December of 2008.
It is made up of different people and today we will be joined by Alberto Nanclares and Miguel Rodríguez Cruz ‘Mister’.

BASURAMA
...we will present a work from 2007, “Tourist visit to the M30”…we will visit the works in the city’s first loop. And another project, “Panorámicas” that considers the brutal change Madrid has undergone.
…we work in Alpedrete, San Sebastián de los Reyes…never in the city’s nerve centres, we have never been in London, or NY, or in Paris, Berlin,… in Barcelona, never; we always work in weird and ugly places…it’s what we like best. 

When we were invited to Linz, not to ART FUTURA, as you may have thought, we were invited to work in neighbourhood cultural centres. In the end it didn’t happen for methodological reasons, but we truly celebrated it to be an ugly and filthy city that smells bad; that’s our work zone…we are dedicated to garbage, rubble, residues…lately we think that we are studying happiness, what progress means, the future.

When we talk about trash it has a lot of economic, psychological and Psychiatrich implications…we discuss development. What’s the future? When will tomorrow come?...

PROJECTION OF THE VIDEO-WORK, “VISIT TO THE M30”
…we love the city of Madrid, its typical and ancient things, stew, the chotis…we loved the M30, it was an urban road, it separated the river, it appeared in a lot of films…it was a place we hung around a lot, a place with a lot of history, with a football stadium just above it…both a strange and fascinating place.

The works were done without any debate whatsoever. Supposedly the biggest works in Europe at that point…fascinated with this deployment we created a tourist visit to the works, this video. A year and a half after the works started Madrid was crazy over them, they had transformed citizens’ daily routine, the city’s psyche…the city was crazy over what it was seeing happen…everything started out to see the works, which was our joy (!) as they couldn’t be seen but only suffered, we rented a double-decker bus and filled it with tourists to go and see the works…

Projection of video
What’s interesting about the project is that it had great impact, media-wise. We thought of it as a tool for those social movements that criticized the destruction of Madrid or the radical changes that the city was suffering these years…due to the lack of information offered by institutions it was consumed keenly by citizens, demanded, absorbed by television channels, with a lot of audience… 

The “PANORÁMICA” project discusses consumer and production processes that trash generates in Madrid, taking pictures where garbage is kept…domestic garbage is generated, dangerous garbage… and it ends up in different dumps in the periphery, far from downtown… 

Pictures of dumps

Walking through this illegal tire cemetery, we find at the end, the housing development of Paco ‘El pocero’…it was really the same thing, an absurd creation of the city… it was the same way of throwing money away…  

A lot of money has been invested in Madrid due to the financial market’s revaluation, and as money can’t be eaten, it turned into millions of flats, 4 million flats in Spain, in Madrid a million in 5 years. Complete insanity…we also analyze Madrid’s dumps, car dumps, the construction of infrastructures…Madrid has spent public money to make roads as if there were nothing better to do…one car roads (picture of the M50), roads that connect areas that need to be connected (?), waste grounds…

We continue with “Panorámicas” investigating new neighbourhoods, what does their existence imply? Like an excrescence of the city, like an urban piece of shit…like San Chinarro, where there is a very famous building done by MRDV (some very cool Dutch architects) while the rest of buildings are copies of copies of copies…this area has almost been finished but others where infrastructures now exist have only been built halfway through because the bubble ended up bursting…

Here we can see the city of Valdeluz, close to the AVE railroad, in Guadalajara, in plots of land belonging to the family of the President of Comunidad de Marid, a neighbourhood for 30000 people where only 300 live…these 6 or 7 ghost towns surrounding Madrid are a fascinating subject…
…in contrast with the Cañada Real, a series of stockbreeding paths that existed around the country which are now occupied by chalets and houses of acceptable quality…but in an area close to Madrid’s dump…to us this is a lot more Madrid! 

 This is a very serious issue because it happens in a city that has great amounts of money, ‘saudi Madrid’…we don’t follow a closed discourse, but the crisis comes and it’s a power subject matter …and now, where do we go?...ghost cities, half built houses, dumps; we are in that paradigm, not a city that develops further but a city that has just ‘crashed’…this is the most interesting material for MADRID_ABIERTO. 

This is the subject, so that the institutional steamroller doesn’t knock us down, and leave us looking stupid, Esperanza Aguirre’s hair gel, Gallardon’s gel…

…I remember when we did the ‘M30’, Miguel Sebastián called us (now Secretary of Industry, then just a candidate to be city Mayor) and looking at us with a serious stare, while sucking on a popsicle, said: What do you think of Madrid, do you think it’s dodgy? And we said, no way! We love Madrid, we love this city…but it is an absurd city! all of the consultants, about 15 of them, looked at each other, they didn’t understand anything.

… Madrid is an absurd city that is trying to clean up, using a lot of deodorant but it still stinks, it smells like one of those British tourists dancing in Benidorm, which smell awful and on top of that use cologne, which is disgusting…

This is what we are working on, we believe Madrid is just like one of these characters…

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