A box with powers.
A box with powers.
A box with powers.
We come to the end of the program, it is Tuesday, June 8, and we go back to tour the surroundings of the Paseo del Arte carrying the materials from our botiquín. This time we aim towards the Fablab of Medialab Prado, where we meet to give shape and material to this box with powers to heal Madrid.
Maps, postcards, flags, songs, and totems totems have been filling and building our botiquín with remedies for the city, objects with an “ironic functional uselessness” that is “the mirror of another utility, a cultural utility, of meaning (…) the narrative utility of some objects that contain stories ” , ”, collecting the words of Virginia López concerning what she calls useless implements as“ tools that allow us not to feel useless, objects that are the result of a contract, often almost improvised and based on what is around ” (2).
(2) Virginia López. Aperos inútiles.
Some moments during the manufacturing process of the medicine cabinet in the Medialab Prado Fablab.
Hospitality tools for cultural institutions.
Among those narrative utilities that we sought to activate with the manufacture of this botiquín, we cannot forget that, with this program, we also sought to to share questions about the role of cultural and artistic centers, about museums, concerning the territory in which they are located and on how they can also develop as neighborhood centers, with the ability to recognize and collect the knowledge that lives in their proximity. Thus, increasing these links with its immediate environment and, specifically with the migrant knowledge that inhabits it, was one of the objectives with which we began the activities of Un botiquín para mi Ciudad.
Generar red entre instituciones culturales públicas y ciudadanía, compartir perspectivas de futuro y posibilidades de la cultura como herramienta útil de transformación social, recuperar nociones de trabajo colectivo, fomentar dinámicas de colaboración entre diferentes tipos de institucionalidad y fomentar la participación activa y crítica de la ciudadanía para una incidencia en la construcción de políticas públicas en cultura eran, también, algunos de los otros retos que estaban en el origen del programa y que se trataron de abordar a través de las itinerancias e interconexiones activadas.
Our botiquín ready to resound in the streets and avenues.
Remedies to place the maintenance of living conditions in common at the center.
Collective responsibility in the care of life sinks in our cities and societies before the new accumulation logic imposed by a global financial sector whose new ways of generating capital gains imply that the system has too many people.
Expulsion and segregation are standard now in Madrid, a city whose growth model is only possible at the cost of dismantling the well-being of an increasingly large majority of its population (3), a city that occupies the first position of capital Europeans in territorial segregation and the second in social inequality (4).
Within the framework of this program, and considering our growing vulnerability and such profoundly violent observations, we have also wanted to ask ourselves about the possibilities to set the remedies that allow us to continue striving to move these logics out of the agenda for the construction of our city, to open a space for other rationalities and systems of organization of social and political life..
(3) Observatorio Metropolitano (2009) Manifiesto por Madrid.
(4) Socio-Economic Segregation in European Capital Cities. Study comparing the situation in 2001 against the situation in 2011 in the thirteen cities under analysis.
This cool botiquín.