Yesterday it was a year since we launched the Grigri Projects website, on September 9, 2019, a space in which to collect our work, projects that seek to re-enchant neighborhoods, cook cities and connect knowledge.

Just a month after that date, a new Grigri Pixel workshop also began, a meeting that, like the entire fourth edition of 2019, revolved around the theme of hospitality and that, although we did not know it then, would be the last of the international workshops of this program.

Since then, a pandemic, a change in priorities in Medialab Prado’s programming and in the policies of the Madrid city council have left us without the possibility of continuing our most representative line of work.

Grigri Pixel was a bet that, thanks to the support of the ACERCA AECID program, of Medialab Prado and thanks to having, in the last year, the wonderful complicity of SERCADE, wanted to propose a space for meeting, production and collaboration with actors and cultural agents from the African continent, to enable articulation with local communities and thus re-enchant different urban spaces. A place from which to problematize and materialize what it means to experience the city collectively, generating spaces in which the diversity and multiplicity of forms, knowledge and stories operate.

Since the beginning of the program in 2016 and until March 2020, we have carried out 9 workshops – in Madrid, Barcelona, Niamey and Dakar – designing and manufacturing grigris as diverse as the places and people who were involved in its materialization, from the solar energy producer cart for “Esta es una Plaza” in Madrid, or the mobile and luminous benches made together with the “Taula Eix Pere IV” for the Passatje Trullàs in Barcelona, to the versatile stage hospitality chairs for the “Arène Théâtre” space in Niamey or the recycled plastic inflatable with which we activate and re-enchant the square in front of Medialab Prado.

During these intense years of work we have had the privilege of having the complicity of 23 creators, thinkers, artists and agitators from the cities of Dakar, Marrakech, Casablanca, Gandiol, Dakar, Bamako, Niamey, Ouagadougou, Lomé, Lagos, Kribi, Cape Town and Maputo. As well as the essential participation of more than 300 local collaborators and the wonderful African diaspora. An incredible transcontinental community of people committed to building environments of possibility for the city in which respect, creativity, care and experimentation prevail.

And it is that grigri is not only the word used in West Africa to describe magical objects, grigri is also the invisible framework, without prejudices or preconceptions, in which new subjectivities of reality can be given rise, to allow that those things that are capable of de-centering us can happen.

We believe that, as has been repeated incessantly lately, today it is more necessary than ever to contribute other imaginaries, from other latitudes, that make it possible to estrange ourselves and to look at ourselves from other places and experiences, and also discover those other imaginaries that inhabit our neighborhoods , thanks to the presence of people from diverse origins, to be able to germinate more just, creative and sustainable shared futures for all.

And from Grigri Projects we will continue, despite the regrets, seeking alliances and enabling actions of exchange and joint creation with this wonderful network of creators and “sorciers” from the continent and the African diaspora that these 5 years of Grigri Pixel have given us.

Well then, à très bientôt Grigri Pixel and derejeb, gracias, initié, merci, thanks !!!

Un abrazo grande

p.d We would love to have your testimonies in audio, video or text about the Grigri Pixel program, if you want you can send it to us by email or share it on social networks with the hashtag #AdiosGrigriPixel

→ We attach here the summary pdf of these five editions as well as a small farewell video 🙂