︎︎︎”Specters of the Urban” workshop, Vallecas

Semi-face-to-face workshop by Nancy Garín (CL) and Antoine Silvestre (FR) that reflected on the possible relations between economic development, urbanisation, coloniality and culture today.


The invitation extended by Espacio de Todo to Espectros de lo Urbano has been an occasion to open a discussion around the project's thesis on the urban and a reflection situated in the neighbourhood of Vallecas with participants involved, in some way, in the local context.

As the project understands it, the urban represents the systematic production of our society, giving form and organisation to what can be called territory. The city, in this context, forms part of this production and thus connects a vast network of spatial and social interrelations that make up the generalised negotiation of capital with the territories it puts to use.

Espectros de Lo Urbano held a session beforehand to explain the theses of the project and the themes we were particularly interested in debating: labour, political struggle, gentrification/evictions, sacrifice/exploitation.

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The neighbourhood of Vallecas is the largest neighbourhood in Europe in terms of surface area. It was formed by the extension of the industrial fabric of Madrid to the east of the city, from a series of internal migrations from different territories of the Spanish state and also from other parts of Europe, at the beginning of the 20th century, in the explosion of industrialisation and the need for expansion into the rural areas of Madrid, which saw its peak in the 1950s. It is a neighbourhood with a long history of struggle and political resistance, with an intense production of spaces of organisation and associativity, and of anti-Francoist and anti-fascist struggle, which has generated a clear identity and a field of very specific imaginaries (Vallekas).

The workshop focused on an open invitation to those who wanted to participate to produce in advance a record (visual, textual, sound, etc...), contextualised in the neighbourhood to share in an open dialogue session. These records were made in the form of drifts or by identifying some point or space in the neighbourhood, which for each participant had a particular significance for their own imaginary about the neighbourhood, about the memory embodied in individualities. A record that could determine, from the micro, the situated, the personal, different narratives about the space and the collective memory of the neighbourhood of Vallecas, beyond the already known macro narratives.



The workshop participants reflected different areas of reflection and perspective on the neighbourhood, from activism, art, the cultural space that welcomed us, science, etc...

In a pleasant session we were able to share the materials brought by each of the participants, opening up exchanges, reflections and a rich debate based on the materials on display, which gradually shaped a collective mapping of the territory of Vallecas.

We now propose to briefly explain the different perspectives and contributions made during the session, with a view to outlining lines of reflection on the urban, based on the group's situated reflections. We think that the debate has been traversed by topics related to the spatial relationship of the system with its territory, as well as very interesting interpretations such as multiple facets of urban space, its tensions, contradictions, uses and hacks, and the ways of inhabiting it. A profound spatial-social reflection that ultimately opens a window on the political dimensions of the urban, the memories and imaginaries it generates.

THE WORKSHOP




a) Invasive species (how we name what we inhabit...)

Nuria and Eva speak to us from Botánica with their presentation "Rebellious plants in resistance to gentrification" and from there we open a conversation on how to hack the categories that are part of the colonial, capitalist and patriarchal machinery. Because they are already here, but is it possible to subvert them and how?

The experience gathered by them goes from the constant negotiation and dispute of what supposedly "belongs" to the territory and what comes from "outside". In this case, seen from the existence of species of flora that are constantly stripped from the space, being catalogued as invasive, when they do not behave according to the logics of landscape, urban or architectural planning. Thus, these categories, which are born within a totalising hierarchy that covers the whole of discursive reality (through the sciences and here, botany for example), serve to determine functions and hierarchies of bodies in the territory, and therefore of power relations, even falsifying the nature or history of what they inhabit.

The division and categorisation of the world is a fundamental part of Western colonial modernity. The need to order, to catalogue, to archive goes hand in hand with the production of the new world system. Just as botany, cartography, biology, law, urbanism, constructed frameworks of fictitious realities such as race and gender, so too did the epistemological division of territories and bodies to naturalise exploitation and legitimise its reproduction. The way in which we refer to plants in the city somehow reflects the colonial order and its nomenclature leaves no doubt.

The subcategories of plants when inhabiting urbanity are striking: introduced, exotic, invasive. In this way, the designed landscape, warns of the production of urbanity, just as it does with the rest of those who inhabit this territory.

This is comparable to the processes of gentrification, where the inhabitants of the territory are expelled and converted into "invaders" within the new urban logics.

Thus, the lifelong neighbour is suddenly no longer part of this new landscape. In the image of the "unwanted", "invasive", "exotic" plants, the inhabitants of the neighbourhood of Vallecas are subjected to the pressures of the urban planning system, to land management, to the expulsion of the existing fauna and flora, in order to force a speculative, profitable future that provides maximum interests for outside investors, so that everything looks modern, orderly and in accordance with the official design.

From an alternative perspective, Martín evidenced the same relationship of imposition between nature and the urban, capturing places where urban infrastructures and nature compete. From a visual approach, Martín superimposes the river with the motorways, playing on the relationship between these flows, where the existence of one means the sacrifice of the other. The urban appears in its spatial dimension on a larger scale, where the connections necessary for its relationship with the peripheral or regional urbanised territories, the motorways, appear to the rivers, double natural structuring elements of the territories for which they compete.



b) Non-surface surfaces / walls breathe and talk.

Mark Fisher reminds us in his book "The Ghosts of My Life" of a term coined by the philosopher Jacques Derridà: hauntology. It is about thinking about the present with all the ghosts it brings with it. Layers of memories, collective and personal histories that had to be constituted and integrated into the sums of subjectivities, and become spectral so that the present is the one we go through and the one that goes through us.



Coco Guzmán makes us traverse, from her register of walls and layers, those spectral lines that the territory shelters, between layers of images and senses. His eye pays attention to signs on the walls, written messages, tears and cracks. An ever-refreshing visual dialogue that lends itself to multiple interpretations through the very textures of urbanity.

For the newcomer to the neighbourhood, the text made up of these hundreds of signs forms a story that, on the surfaces of the walls, tells whoever stops to read it: a sort of palimpsest, where the sum rearticulates collective memories of juxtaposed times. Memories of the territory, but which often speak to us of other memories that go beyond it. These layers, these spectral registers of the past, active in each line, stroke and colour, help us to activate the present we inhabit and to think/create possible futures.

Isabel's tour also deciphered the text of the city. Through a series of photographs of ephemeral, "vandalic", timely writings, she shows lines of desire and tactics of resistance. The appropriation of the word in the city, direct semantic irruptions transform the grey colour of any street into a temporary gallery. As she points out, this "third landscape" is in constant struggle against censorship, against the grey colour that relentlessly overlays a unifying and silencing layer.


The hierarchy of those who enunciate the city and those who use it is at stake. Taking up Lefebvrian's need for the right to the city, the urban is a place of confluence, negotiation, dialogue and confrontation. The surfaces of its urbanity offer multiple superimposed layers where texts emerge that are as temporary as they are necessary.

For her part, Concepción, drifting in the manner of a bicycle ride, will try to recognise those spaces that have remained fixed in her mind since other times. As a "visitor", her attempt to register this drift is initially made impossible by the uncomfortable sensation of being an intruder in the space. As if that at least remains as a trace of resistance for the neighbours, in the face of the processes of gentrification and the machine of representation that attempts to impose itself from outside. "Ronda sur" is transformed into a green ring from which to contemplate the neighbourhood and part of the city. The video journey captures the sounds and pleasant images of a space that struggles not to become a sign, and El Pozo finally turns out to be paradoxically the highest point of the city.


We see this type of process repeated in countless territories, as Carlos points out, who has carried out his recording work in the neighbourhood of Lavapiés, where we can see not only the marks of property speculation, but also the forms of resistance to gentrification. Carlos speaks to us of layers, of worlds that apparently coexist, of fictions created under the cloak of art and culture that cover the processes of gentrification (hence the concept of gentrification), where new poetics are born from the destruction of existing ones. The fiction of the public vs. the private is dressed up as art. On the other side a mobilised collectivity, where self-management and self-organisation continue to be power and life.

c) Stubborn memories of the urban

Territory has been a space of dispute for narratives about our past, and even more so when it comes to processes of conflict and social trauma. The politics of memory imposed in the processes of transition have made use of urbanity and its normalising and pacifying projects, limiting themselves to memorials and symbolic spaces, but erasing the vestiges that can articulate the narratives of the struggles outside the institutional framework.


Vallecas has been and will continue to be a space in dispute, and the traces that the space and the territory keep of the past of the workers', anti-fascist and anti-Francoist struggle reflect this.

This is precisely what Sergio sought to articulate in his recording exercise. In the search for a mapping of the now non-existent places of urban struggle, and of those marks of a collective past of resistance and neighbourhood revolution.

His register escaped the hegemony of visuality, in a drift through three emblematic parks in Vallecas, he captured sounds to immerse us in a sound space where the sound of the train, the water, the birds, the machines, the wind and the human bustle on the road, served as a stage/landscape to give an account of those layers of the past that he was constructing in his narrative. These "Sounds of territory" are accompanied by visual records in the form of cartographies, which reflect the location of each of these sound archives.

https://puntorojo.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Recopilación-Audios.wav

The Parque Forestal de Entrevías, Palomeras bajas and the Parque del Cerro del Tío Pío are the environment recorded and mapped as a living memory of the neighbourhood's work and political struggles. From the libertarian and anti-Francoist struggles to the ecological and environmental struggles, from the struggles for decent housing to the transfeminist struggles, from the neighbourhood councils and self-management to the processes of institutionalisation, oenegisation and professionalisation of the spaces of resistance and struggle, Sergio gives an account of this continuous and telluric history. Struggles that in some cases are still present and reactivated, and in others forgotten or crystallised in an immobile past.

Something that Todos por la Praxis, our hosts, know very well and that is the reason why they have sustained this space of activation that is Espacio de Todo.

We are grateful for the interesting participation of the compas who came to the workshop to exchange ideas, knowledge, reflections, desires and imaginaries about the urban, about Vallecas:

Nuria Preciado
Eva Castillo
Coco Guzmán
María Concepción Mateos
Martín Flugelman
Sergio Cabrera
Isabel Lakis
Carlos Sanchez