Weaving a cross-border neighborhood.
Weaving a cross-border neighborhood.
What is our neighborhood? How do we define where we live our lives? Is that where we work or study? Is it the place where those other people with whom we have a strong bond live? What are the places I go to meet them? …
Based on the reflections and questions raised, in this third collective work session – on Thursday, May 20 – we met again at SERCADE to weave our personal trajectories in a series of collective maps that represent the fabric of our spaces of affection, they are critical, undisciplined and dissident cartographies of the city of Madrid.
Hidden, seemingly banal, and forgotten places, conflict areas, and marginal spaces, but also common public spaces such as mass transit and interchange stations – gates to and from the city – or large urban parks are represented in this exercise of territorial empowerment. An action in which we try to make apparent what lies invisible on the map of the city, incorporating emotions, perceptions, subjectivities, and the multiple looks that reveal those spaces that heal or hurt us, those spaces in which we feel welcome and others in which we experience situations that expel us.
Weaving our personal trajectories into a common map of places and experiences.
Maps to represent a world in which many worlds fit.
The spatial structuring of our social relationships and the meanings it brings to our lives is, to a large extent, and increasingly for more people, fragmented and dispersed. Also, the ways in which we define what our neighborhood iswhat our affective territory is, are increasingly diverse, thus, the way our life trajectories are articulated, and the way in which the spaces it takes place are intertwined, are multiple and draw maps of great heterogeneity and richness.
In order to to unravel the little stories that weave the common history of the people who make up our work commissions to heal Madrid, we propose to draw and weave, in this third session, the cartographies of our cross-border neighborhood.
The commissions presenting their maps of trajectories.
We continue in this way with the elaboration of our botiquín to cure Madrid, our kit of useful knowledge, with these maps of daily life in which spaces, people, and experiences have a place and in which we also share our intimate experiences answering questions such as:
What are the places, the people, who have taken care of your life trajectory? In what places have you felt at home? In which ones you didn’t? Why? What are the routes that are part of your daily life in the city? What sites have you felt you are allowed to access? Which ones are not? Why? What are the spaces and people that have made you feel like you are a part of the city? What links have you established with them?
Ultimately, we try to share those situations that allow us to understand and recognize each other, to be together, and to learn together.
Weaving a cross-border neighborhood.