︎︎︎ ︎︎︎”The Other City” in Espacio de Todo.

Within the project ‘The Other City’ two activations took place in Espacio de Todo.

The programme began with the conference ‘ARCHIPIÉLAGO STALKER: messages from the periphery’, given by Francesco Careri, architect, researcher and author of Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice. Careri, founder of the urban art laboratory Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade in Rome, shared his vision of walking as an artistic practice and its relationship with peripheral spaces.

In addition, Gloria G. Durán and Francisca Blanco Olmedo coordinated the first laboratory, entitled ‘Maneras de hacer ciudad’, a space dedicated to the exploration and prototyping of cultural projects for intervention in public space. Over the course of several meetings, various situated art practices were addressed, with a focus on community, activism and culture with a social twist.

CONFERENCE: ‘ARCHIPIÉLAGO STALKER: Messages from the Periphery. Inaugural lecture The Other City’.

Francesco Careri, founder of the urban art laboratory Stalker/Osservatorio Nomade in Rome, a collective that carried out public art actions in the informal and multicultural city, and author of the renowned Walkscapes: Walking as an aesthetic practice, visited Madrid to inaugurate the programme The Other City.

From 5 to 8 October 1995, a collective of Italian artists and architects carried out a legendary walk through the abandoned areas of the city of Rome. They called this action ‘Stalker through the current territories’ and based it on a manifesto: ‘Those forgotten areas that form the negative of the contemporary city. Places that are difficult to understand and project... but which, at the same time, send messages to those who are willing to receive them...’, they wrote in their first pages.

Francesco Careri was one of the main instigators of that adventure and, since then, he has explored, provoked and written about a research practice that intertwined territory, landscape and periphery with walking as an aesthetic stance. In his lecture, Careri returned to the founding figure of the collective he led for almost thirty years, Stalker, a name that evokes the enigmatic character in Andréi Tarkovski's film The Zone: a strange and almost mystical being that traversed a liminal territory, without past or future, but capable of offering the last glimmer of hope.

LABORATORY: ‘Ways of making a city: laboratory for prototyping cultural projects for intervention in public space’.

Within the framework of The Other City Madrid, ‘Maneras de hacer ciudad’, a theoretical-practical laboratory coordinated by Gloria G. Durán and Francisca Blanco Olmedo, was held with the aim of prototyping cultural projects focused on intervention in public space.

Throughout the laboratory, various community, activist and situated cultural and artistic practices were explored, encouraging reflection and research on the social turn of art. In addition, projects and agents from Madrid that had developed or were implementing forms of cultural and activist work linked to territory, community and liminal spaces were presented.

From the end of the 1960s, artists began to leave the galleries and join different activist demands. Both artists and activists agreed on the shared responsibility of making cities more liveable. Although the art institution was slow to recognise these hybrid practices, once they were integrated, the projects multiplied.

The programme dealt with different experiences developed in Madrid that had opened up new spaces of possibility for the social and cultural fabric. Cases of citizen laboratories and flexible and open spaces of encounter and knowledge were analysed, where experimental forms of cultural production were tested.