Grigri Pixel 2019 – Workshop “How far does your house open?”
Grigri Pixel 2019 - Workshop "How far does your house open?"
Grigri Pixel is a program that explores the practices of cultural cooperation and citizenship between Africa and Europe. The project is developed around a workshop for the design and manufacture of objects – “grigris” that intervene and activate urban spaces from artistic practices and digital manufacturing, with a collaborative and experimental nature, coming from both continents.
For the second phase of the fourth edition of Grigri Pixel, a production workshop around hospitality was developed from October 14 to 26 at Medialab Prado in collaboration with the NGO SERCADE activating objects and designing hospital actions that will make up a final festive intervention in the Plaza de Letras, in front of the Medialab Prado building.
This workshop is carried out from the first phase of this fourth edition developed between May and June with three sessions in collaboration with the SERCADE reception center, the discussion between Marina Garcés and Felwine Sarr in Madrid, and the workshop in Niamey, Niger in June of 2019.
The workshop has been developed around 3 axes: the constructive and urban spaces intervention axe, the technological and digital manufacturing area, and the research, recovery, and activation of memories.
This action will be carried out to reactivate and recover physical and social meeting spaces in the Barrio de Las Letras that make possible mutual recognition, the acceptance of differences, and the creation of “common worlds” among those who inhabit it, regardless of its origin or duration of your stay. It is a collective and transdisciplinary action that proposes to make the city and the neighborhood hospitable places where one can feel part of the community, “neighbors”.
Likewise, this workshop is proposed as a space to investigate and reconnect experiences of city creation between Africa and Europe to raise common questions capable of making visible synergies, meeting points, or differences in the practices and processes of care and re-enchantment of the public spaces between these two territories.
Grigri Pixel Program october 2019
Public presentation of African initiatives
During this presentation, we have learned in detail the work and proposal of the five African initiatives selected for the Grigri Pixel 2019 workshop that together with a score of collaborating people will activate objects and design actions around hospitality on October 26 in collaboration with the SERCADE center.
The African initiatives participating in this edition are the following:
? Ana Raquel Machava : Architect and director of the Maputo Cinema Festival (Mozambique)
? Meryem Aboulouafa: Singer, composer, and designer in Casablanca (Morocco)
? Amadou Mbaye: Community development coordinator of the Hahatay space, in Gandiol, Saint Louis (Sénégal)
? Gildas Guiella: Maker and founder of Ougalab, in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso)
? Nana Kadidjatou Abdou Mounkaila: Gestora del espacio Arene Théâtre, en Niamey (Niger)
We have also had the participation of the architect and researcher Alice Buoli who will share a study of the work done by Grigri Pixel in recent years.
Meeting on Hospitality
At the end of World War II, there were seven walls or fences throughout the world that prevented population transit between territories. Today, seventy-seven. In this context of a crisis of responses of the Nation States to the natural fact of migrating and moving around the world, and at a time when lives are put into permanent circulation for their maximum capitalization, the Grigri Pixel 2019 edition has wanted to explore Collectively, the possibilities of reactivating and recovering physical and social meeting and hospital spaces that make possible mutual recognition and the creation of a “common world” among those of us who inhabit them.
How to make a city or neighborhood a welcoming place? How do we feel community no matter where we come from? How to become neighbors, even being newcomers?
De la mano de Abdourahmane Seck (Universidad Gaston Berger de Sant Louis, Senegal), Modesta di Paola (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Paula Domingo (Asociación Elin, Ceuta) y Serigne Mbayé (Sindicato de Manteros de Madrid), hemos tratado de responder a estas y otras preguntas desde sus experiencias vitales y las respectivas visiones que ofrece la antropología y la historia, el arte, la intervención social y el activismo.
Hand in hand with Abdourahmane Seck (Gaston Berger University of Sant Louis, Senegal), Modesta di Paola (Complutense University of Madrid), Paula Domingo (Elin Association, Ceuta), and Serigne Mbayé (Union of Manteros of Madrid), we have tried to respond to these and other questions from their life experiences and the respective visions offered by anthropology and history, art, social intervention, and activism.
To know the theoretical framework of the meeting, you can download the document in Spanish, French, or English at this link.
Presentation of the results of the workshop in the Plaza de Letras
On Saturday, October 26, a festive and artistic intervention was presented in the Plaza de las Letras that wants to respond collectively to the question, how far does your house open? generating an inflatable space to project the film resulting from the workshop’s research inside and present the grigribox, a mobile device with digital storage space, and free software wifi.
This work, presented in the square in front of Medialab Prado, was carried out during the two weeks of Grigri Pixel’s workshop, in complicity with five artists and creators from the African continent together with Adriana C. Tarela, Talla Fall, Adam Hassan Saleh, Nasser Sokante, Patricia Alemany, Beatriz Lorenzo, José Hernández , Marina Benítez, Gema Marín, Sarah Durgali, Paula Jiménez, Yanelys Núñez, Diego Andrés Ramírez, Lucia Muñoz-Delgado, Artemisa Delmar Semedo, Elena Benito, Carmen de la Fuente, Maleny Cáceres, Eva Gordo, Steve Zedong, Besha, Esther Poppe, Lena Heubusch , Daniela Cardillo and Claudia Oliveira.
A festive proposal resulting from the workshop facilitated and designed by David Pérez, architect; Blanca Callén, social researcher and professor at the UVIC-UCC and the UOC; both members of Grigri Cultural Projects, and Yago Torroja, an electronic engineer and professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid. It also has a mediation team made up of Iris Hernández, Yannick Tresor Dzouko Komgang, and Adrian de Miguel.
Selected African Initiatives Participating in the Workshop
Meryem Aboulouafa
Casablanca, Morocco
https://www.facebook.com/meryemaboulouafa/
Moroccan, graduated from the École Supérieur des Beaux Arts de Casablanca as an interior architect and designer in 2011. She has participated in numerous national and international artist residencies, among which the “ICI” residency carried out in 2010 and focused on design and reproduction stands out. of the city of Casablanca in a specific Spatio-temporal context.
Parallel to the interior architecture and design, music is omnipresent in his career. An 8-year itinerary at the Paris Conservatory in Casablanca reinforced by multiple collaborations with musicians from different countries.
At the Casablanca Festival, he performs the first of a long series of musical interventions on national and international stages.
This experience is accompanied by the participation in “ICI-MÊME” in 2012 in France, in Marseille. A concert of sounds of the city collected and received through an exploration of the city of Marseille in its sound aspect, an occupation of urban space, and a guided tour of the city with closed eyes.
She is currently a businesswoman and professor of interior architecture at the Escuela Superior de Casablanca.
Ana Raquel Machava
Maputo, Mozambique
http://maputocinemafestival.org
Ana Raquel Machava is an architect and urban planner who graduated in 2016. With a special interest in the opportunities that the city offers, she and her partners have a commitment from architecture to the development of the urban environment and to the creation of conditions to offer alternative solutions to daily affairs and for the development of a society capable of responding to new contexts of human reality.
Since 2016, she has developed urban experiences in the city of Maputo where she and her colleagues reinterpret abandoned or excluded spaces from urban dynamics with the implementation of interventions such as temporary movie theaters. Its objective is to understand the meeting points between architecture and cinema and how both practices can revitalize a city and make citizens connect with this type of space and infrastructure.
Thanks to these experiences in the field of architecture, Ana has had the opportunity to travel to the city of Johannesburg where she meets relevant contemporary artists who help her broaden her awareness of the present and who challenge her conceptions about African cities.
In 2019, Ana travels to Eswatini to work at the renowned Bushfire festival where she continues to grow not only as an artist but also as a professional. Back in Maputo, she has developed private architecture projects to guarantee the sustainability of her Estúdio 5 office, and, in parallel, she has launched the Maputo Cinema Festival project as its executive director.
Amadou Mbaye
Gandiol, Saint Louis, Sénégal
www.hahatay.org
A graduate in Spanish Language from the Gaston Berger University of Saint Louis, Amadou finished his higher studies in Spain (Granada) within the framework of the Master’s Degree in Development Cooperation.
Since May 2018, he has been the coordinator of the community development section of the Hahatay center in which multiple work sectors are covered and where he cooperates with young people and women mainly.
Hahatay is a meeting space that unites a group of people with the same concern and commitment to get involved in integral human development. The activities developed in the center have focused specifically since 2012 on reflection and work around concepts such as the relationship with the other, the reception or the “Teranga” that has to do with exchange.
The position of Africa and Africans in the world is part of the daily reflections and debates in Hahatay. They work closely with young people to jointly discover what they can bring to the world as Africans. In this framework, they work from the participatory construction at the same time as discourse, intention, and action.
Gildas Guiella
Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
www.ouagalab.com
The OuagaLab, the first fab lab in Burkina Faso, was created in December 2011 at the initiative of Gildas Guiella and a dozen young Burkinabe who participated in the third edition of the InnovAfrica Forum, which took place in Ouagadougou that same year.
Established informally and temporarily housed in the premises of the Yam Pukri association in Ouagadougou, the OuagaLab organized in 2012 its first activities around the assembly of a numerical control milling machine, the presentation of open-source computer programs, and the programming of cards Arduino. Subsequently, in 2013, a Pigott wind turbine was manufactured, which will be presented in Abidjan during the fifth edition of InnovAfrica.
In 2014, through crowdfunding, the OuagaLab obtained the necessary funding to set up its own space that is built with their own hands by the members of this fab lab. The OuagaLab team has grown over the years maintaining a spirit of transforming obstacles into opportunities through collective intelligence, solidarity, and exchange. Currently, from the OuagaLab, they work on the development of tools to improve well-being and health conditions such as Carto Malaria, a project to geolocate areas of illegal dumping of waste that, with the presence of stagnant water, become areas risk in malaria transmission or “ECOLE LIBRE DU FASO” a briefcase with all the open-source data accessible from a simple mobile phone to make this knowledge accessible without the need for the internet.
Nana Kadidjatou Abdou Mounkaila
Niamey, Niger
www.arenetheatre.blogspot.com
Born in Zinder (Niger) in 1982, Nana holds a diploma in Administration and Management of Cultural Projects obtained in 2011 in Niamey. After graduating, she carried out cultural management internships in Niamey, Ouagadougou, Togo, Luxembourg, and Montbéliard.
Mother of two boys and a girl, she currently works for the Arène Théâtre company. For 6 years she has been in charge of the administrative and accounting matters for the activities of this company as well as the Émergences Festival, a theater festival based in Niamey that promotes theatrical shows in small proximity spaces.
For just one year the Arène Théâtre company has had its own space in the Séno district, in the north of Niamey. This district was founded in 2012 to host people who were victims of the heavy floods in August of that same year, it is a neighborhood with all kinds of deficiencies and it is also a place of reception for migrants from other African countries.
In this way, thanks to its location, the company links its activities with a particularly underserved and marginalized population. In its recently created space, Arène Théâtre hosts, for example, part of the programming of the Bijini Bijini festival of street arts, also offering artistic and cultural training to people who live in the vicinity.