El Madrileño del Año
El Madrileño del Año
Urban action and intervention for La Noche en Blanco in Madrid 2010 curated by Basurama. Anyone could become the protagonist of this commercializing, spectacular and culturally neutralizing urban marketing event and… it could have been you!
Thousands of Madrid residents and visitors became Alberto Santander, El Madrileño del Año, a formerly anonymous citizen who, during this event, was the image of the city in the press and on the street through thousands of masks during the Noche en Blanco 2010 that reproduced his face.
EL MADRILEÑO DEL AÑO IN THE PRESS:
Universal Exhibitions, European Capitals of Culture … Madrid, like many other cities, does not escape the race to become the host of one of these great events of great promotional impact that will put it on the international map and which will lay the foundations for promoting urban transformation processes under the pretext of “adapting” the city for the event; mechanisms that align investments and that involve the entire city.
Events such as the Olympic Games, to which Madrid always aspires as a firm candidate – despite being continuously rejected as the organizer of one of the most precious trophies in urban marketing – or the finals of the World Cup, Tennis Master Series … are some of the strategies most pursued by cities that, in continuous competition, seek rapid impacts that, however, in the long term do not usually achieve the expected results with transformations that are only explained from the logic that the event imposes, generally speculative.
CASTING AND MOVING PHOTO-BOOT:
This competition between cities, which frequently leads to waste and the carrying out of bulky operations, is usually successful in terms of generating broad consensus in the immediate future thanks to a mercantilist showmanship and cultural neutrality, finally resulting in debt debt almost always. city and in the expulsion of population from the areas on which it operates.
The White Night – born in Paris in 2002 as a pretext to bring contemporary creation closer to citizens through an event that opens all the museums and main cultural places of the city during one night – is, on its scale, one more these urban marketing strategies that fuel the phenomenon of brand cities.
THOUSANDS OF MADRILEÑOS BECAME ALBERTO SANTANDER:
El Madrileño del Año proposes for the 2010 edition of the White Night in Madrid an action that, appropriating and subverting the aforementioned marketing strategies, aims to turn any citizen into the most important person in the city during one night.
We generate an online platform open to the participation of anyone who wants to apply, with no other condition than explaining in a tweet why they want to be the man from Madrid of the year.
ALBERTO SANTANDER, EL MADRILEÑO DEL AÑO:
We also organize a traveling photo-booth that goes through different neighborhoods of the city to further open the potential spectrum of people who may want to stand as candidates, an action that will also serve to publicize the action and invite them to get involved in choosing the Madrid of the year through online voting.
Alberto Santander was the person chosen to represent the city through the multiplication of his face in the press and in the streets, any person whose personal story became the story shared by thousands of people during just one night.
VIDEOS OF THE PROJECT:
A project by David Pérez / PKMN [pac-man] Architectures
Photos by: Almudena Mestre, Arantxa Boyero, Fani Alonso, Guillermo Sola, Lady Dilemas, Leticia Otegui, Lucía Martínez, María Carmona y Raquel Cortés.
September 2010
Madrid [Spain]