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[Teddy Cruz. VALLECAS ABIERTO: HOW IS YOUR ART GOING TO HELP US?]

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(JANUARY 2010)

CONTEXT

From the global frontier to the borderline neighborhood
Architectural investigation by artists in the frontier between Tijuana, Mexico and San Diego, California, has focused on observing the urban frontier crossing dynamics between these two cities through the surveillance and immigration policies, the conflict between formal and informal economies and town planning, and tensions between the sites where economic power resides and impoverished marginal areas that define modern cities nowadays.

The multiple dividing vectors that operate at global scales between geopolitical frontiers, natural resources and communities end up inscribing themselves in the cities at the modern neighborhood scale. At this point is where global conflict takes on a particular specificity, translating into a local crisis through lack of housing, jobs and public and social infrastructures.

This is the way in which Cruz and M7Red’s work has focused on the urban neighborhood micro scale, manifesting as production space where new conceptions of economic and social sustainability housing and density may be amplified. This process has motivated them to question the role of architecture and art as producers of new interaction between physical space, alternative programs, institutions and communities.

The façade of Casa de America as a production site
Their proposal for MADRID ABIERTO intends to extend this investigation and to adapt it to the context of Madrid and to the façade of Casa de America. Beyond a singular and protagonist, purely visual intervention, their proposal has to do with the creation of interaction between institutions, networks and social actors, economic resources and a specific neighborhood of Madrid. Instead of intervening upon the façade of Casa de America, they have been interested on working in it, literally activating it with a work program, a collaboration platform with other Spanish and Latin American artists and architects. Transforming the façade into a production site to conceive a project that may be functional once MADRID ABIERTO is over, creating an event after the event.

ELEMENTS AND SEQUENCE OF THE PROJECT

A collaboration
They propose to activate the façade by producing an interdisciplinary critic. This project is developed mainly by Teddy Cruz with the collaboration of the M7Red group from Buenos Aires, Argentina, made up of architects Mauricio Corbalan and Pio Torroja. They conceive this initial process as ‘an artist in residency’ inside the program of MADRID ABIERTO (a program inside the program), transforming their intervention in Casa de America in a platform for cultural exchange that facilitates and promotes the presence of architects and Latin American artists in order to create contact with local dynamics inside a neighborhood of Madrid.

A neighborhood: Puente de Vallecas
They have chosen Puente de Vallecas as the neighborhood to operate because of its history as frontier in the margins of the urban structure of Madrid, with a significant amount of immigrant population and because of its associative and activist network. Inside this neighborhood they have selected a series of agencies and social actors that will be part of the project, including Vallecas Radio, Asociacion al Alba and Asociacion Cultural de la Kalle .

The open façade
The elements that constitute the physical intervention of the façade are minimal: a text and a ladder. 1. The text contextualizes the intervention in an emblematic way, by stating on the façade a question that was made by a Paraguayan immigrant to a group of artists during a dialogue in Villa 31, an informal settlement inside Buenos Aires, in which Teddy Cruz and M7Red participated. “How is your art going to help us?” is the question they have decided to bring from Buenos Aires to place it on the façade of Casa de America and making it the background of their project on this edition of MADRID ABIERTO, suggesting the necessity of finding a more functional relation between investigation and contemporary artistic intervention and the production of the city. 2. The ladder is the physical element that enables them to ‘penetrate’ the façade while activating it internally, using the Inca Lounge as the scenario for a series of workshops between different types of public and activists of the neighborhood.

The architecture of a Conversation
The active workshops will be orchestrated and conceptualized thanks to the collaboration of Teddy Cruz and M7Red, suggesting a series of rules and criteria to shape the conversation and the alternative project towards the neighborhood. These are some of the themes of content and initial parameters of the event:

- The role of artistic practices related to real estate crisis, the shortage of socio-economic resources and the public infrastructure.

- Putting forth the question of the Participative Budget: The idea of linking a seed of economic capital that emerges from its budget in MADRID ABIERTO to support the intervention in Vallecas and associating it with other public resources and processes of action and urban imagination, inside and outside the State.

- Creating a play for the location of dispersed resources, without a previous idea of what should be made of them and, later, with the actors and the public, create interaction between them, spatially and temporarily, using the façade as an interface between this thought and the city in real time.

- Apart from the ordinary meetings that will be held inside the façade with the social actors (activist practices) of Vallecas to create the intervention project for the neighborhood, exchanges with the general public will be conducted. During three separated meetings, the Inca Lounge will be opened through the façade in order to invite a group of people, some of them chosen by the actors, other institutionalized ones and another group of more diverse people. During these three meetings a ‘mini-performance’ will be elaborated inside the Inca Lounge where actors and M7Red will create a public update of the conversation and the neighborhood locations that have been selected.

- The façade of Casa de America could maybe have a ‘double’ on the Internet, and in some strategic point of the neighborhood. For example, they’re interested in the thought of duplicating the façade several times.

- For the artists, an essential part of this project is that, once MADRID ABIERTO ends, and the installation is dismantled, their intervention may produce the architecture of collaboration between the activist groups of the neighborhood to generate a collective project for Vallecas. That is when the post project of MADRID ABIERTO will be initiated.

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