My Madrid
My Madrid
Comenzamos
Building the city should be a public and common issue .
. How can we collect and give rise to the different experiences of the people who inhabit the city of Madrid? Sharing the heterogeneity of our experiences and and addressing the diversity of ways we have to tell ourselves about our city was one of the objectives we pursued in this first session, the starting point for the manufacture of our botiquín.
On Thursday, May 6, with great emotion, we met at Calle Lope de Vega, in the SERCADE space to start with our program of periodic meetings that would keep us gathering together for the following two months. We gave the first steps indesigning and shaping our botiquín to heal and re-enchant Madrid.
We began the encounter by grouping around an offering table whereby each of the people participating dropped a personal object. They are our amulets, the protective objects that take care of us. We would use these amulets to introduce ourselves to the rest.
Four moments during the elaboration of the sign of “our Madrid” and drawing our personal imaginaries.
My Madrid
What is the botiquín? Why make a botiquín for Madrid? How and when are we going to do it? Before continuing, we share the program and talk about some of the urgencies and desires.
How is your experience in Madrid? What are you missing? In what places do you feel welcomed? What do you think you can contribute?
Using as a pretext a play on words with the proper name of Madrid – and from the iconographic element that results from the materialization of the word MADRID when transformed into a large sign made with recycled cardboard boxes – we propose to cover this Madrid with texts that collect our answers to these questions.
Thus, to allow us to contribute our first insights about what we need to heal the city, we propose some unfinished sentences, written on different colored paper, to complete them with our remedies for Madrid:
- I would fill Madrid with…
- The places and experiences that hurt us in Madrid are…
- The places that take care of us in Madrid are…
- The knowledge, skills, and powers that I can bring to Madrid are…
First group portraits of the commissions to curate Madrid.
We finished this first session – in which we are giving ourselves a space to work on the city we want and what we want to do to remedy what makes it difficult for us to live in it– dedicating time to conform ourselves as commissions to heal the city and, to do this, we propose to work from our personal imaginaries.
We started working individually, and from the use of drawing as a tool, to represent some of our imaginaries. To do this, we propose to think about three personal things that we will try to translate visually:
- A favorite object with which you feel especially connected.
- A skill, knowledge, or personal power that you would highlight about yourself.
- A favorite place in Madrid.
From these imaginaries drawn, we meet in five groups of between four and six people, and we do a pooling from which we will form our five commissions defined by a name, an emblem, and a work area.
Some of the personal imaginaries collected.