en

51 WE Riders
Marksearch
Oakland, USA
2006
www.marksearch.org

WE Riders, is a three-month creative exploration conducted by the Marksearch team (Bruce Douglas + Sue Mark) which aims to find geographical and cultural definitions in the western and eastern areas of Oakland in California. The project sprang from the questions and doubts raised by many residents in Oakland regarding their city since, although the difference between both areas is consolidated in the everyday life of the residents, these areas do not appear on the maps on the news and in political campaigns. In the summer of 2006, WE Riders rode on a tandem bike across the city collecting and witnessing stories and images in a travelling kiosk made with recycled traffic signs.

During the weekly rides, we spoke with the old residents of Oakland, children and school groups in the farmers’ markets, with passers-by in the public squares, parks and sidewalks. The comments made by the people were hung on the kiosk and on the weblog (www.weridersoakland.blogspot.com) so that both areas could share the information. In three months, over 200 people contributed to the project making maps and filling them in. Thus a dialogue has been built up with continuous additions made regarding positive opinions on Oakland.

WE Riders promotes the values of eco-tourism as a platform to explore and understand the cultural diversity of the place that is home: Oakland, California. This project is based on eco-tourism according to the definition of the National Geographic Foundation: “ecological tourism, which sustains or highlights the geographical character of the place, its environment, culture, aesthetics, heritage and welfare of its residents”.

50 Hangueando-Periódico con Patas
Raimond Chaves
El Cerro, Naranjito, Puerto Rico; Berlín; Lima; Barrio
Venecia de Bogotá, Colombia; San Juan de Puerto Rico; Módena; Terrassa; Barcelona; Sevilla; Lleida
2002-2006
www.puiqui.com
This travelling-publishing initiative was carried out from what was sometimes called explicitly a Mobile Station. This station designated the sum of: a) the will to work with others and in various contexts in the places where it reached after being invited as an artist; b) the ability of understanding and agreeing on how this could be used in such meetings; and c) collective building of a temporary space where the public arena could be promoted.

Since the project originated in Puerto Rico, I chose the Splanglish word of Hangueando —from the English to hang around—, a gerund which means being in a place without any predetermined destination. The subtitle of Newspaper with Legs referred to the movement and also the fact that in Peru a “pata” or leg means friend.

HPP (in its Spanish initials) as an almost independent exercise of press provides several editions of publications which vindicated the ability of people to tell their own experiences. Thus in the form of a string newspaper people were invited to reflect on the role of the media, doubts were aired about the limitations and the typical passive role played by readers of the traditional press. An invitation to read the press differently and a suggestion to do it as you want.

Thus, starting from a travelling newsroom which went to places instead of being stationary and using simple domestic equipment (computers, laptops, scanner, A3 printer, digital camera and recorder) it turned the publishing of a newspaper into a public event and reading it into a collective event.

49 Espais, trànsits i dispositius mòvils
Raumlabor
Barcelona, Espanya
2011
www.raumlabor.net

We are interested in cities as activity areas. Urban identity is established by the identification of oneself as regards the city. In the past a Gypsy caravan would visit our village every two years with a marquee. They would travel up and down the country loaded with the latest inventions. The locals felt great excitement and also a feeling of great fear. This Nomadic lifestyle of freedom was somehow raising doubts about the foundations of our orderly, silent community. After three or four weeks when the caravan was about to leave, there was always someone who had gone missing, and many others found it difficult to go back to their usual routines. We seek to consider the idea of a mobile museum in the same way! What could be more different than travelling from place to place in our days? What role is played by the group in our ‘post-everything society? What should happen in a mobile museum, transporting contents and meanings from one place to another? How can we doubt our everyday routines? In which mirror could we see the best of ourselves? What kind of art can be exhibited in a mobile museum? The mobile museum we wish to design consists of mobile structures. Each structure will have its own independent function, but combined with and related to one another they can all create new kinds of museums and possibilities, to temporarily redefine public space. At the workshop we will create a model on a 1:5 scale with drawings of the museum. Each group must develop a mobile unit that can function independently and be combined to form the mobile museum.

The workshop “Spaces, travels and mobile devices” took place in October 2011 in the context of the general project “Ceci n’est pas une voiture”.

48 Folk Float
Public Works
Egremont, UK
2007
www.publicworksgroup.net

Folk Float is a mobile archive in the city of Egremont.
Its shape and mechanisms were determined by the original archive and due to the expectations of the groups involved in it. The Egremont archive was, and still is, an eclectic collection of objects, artefacts and publications that was collected by an informal network of individuals and which was once stored in a private room. It has never been formalized despite the great interest raised by it and the wish to create a public space to exhibit, explain, discuss, extend and shape it.

We rebuilt an old milk float (an electric vehicle that delivers milk door to door) to incorporate a series of functions that can easily respond to the different situations in which the Folk Float could be involved. The vehicle has a display cabinet for valuable objects, a display window for special themes and temporary donations, a place for tea and coffee and a workshop bench, a projection screen, covered meeting and storage areas, a table of contents of all the features in the archive and a blog to enter new features online.

As an architectural construction, a project like Folk Float offers both a spatial reality that can act in the here and now, a precedent for thought and also for the construction of new kinds of “buildings”, which can respond to a specific local situation —for example, a local history museum—, without having to import architectural models from other places. The ambition of Egremont is to develop a permanent public archive that, thanks to its form and construction, can be propagated through space and time.

47 BASEmóvel ou Conversa como lugar
Vitor Cesar
Fortaleza, Brasil
2002-2008
www.vitorcesar.org

Between 2002 and 2004, the Transição Listrada (Renata Costa Lima, Rodrigo Costa Lima and Vitor Cesar) invited people,

presentations and debates to come to BASE, the artists’ workspace in Fortaleza. The space closed down and subsequently the BASEmóvel was born: a flexible structure whose aim is to provide meeting space, conversations and study areas.

The BASEmóvel has been turned into several formats. The first edition held consisted of a series of workshops inside Ceará, as the artists project and how they formed the organization. To carry out the workshops, all the material collected in the two years that BASE existed —a small library, photographs and videos— were made available for consultation. In the second edition, held in collaboration with Graziela Kunsch —an “easy chair for two” which houses a library— was used at the exhibition Campo Coletivo, at the Centro Universitario Maria Antonia.

46 Carrinho multimedia
Ana Dumas
Salvador, Bahia, Brasil
2009
www.carrinhomultimidia.com

A travelling art and communications centre: an array of ideas, concepts, images, texts, electronic sounds, excerpts from the 21st century. This collage of references of the universe of pop and folk music: coffee trolleys in Bahia, sounds from Jamaica and New York, arte povera, pop art, punk, tropicalism, Socratic philosophy. A travelling gallery, low resolution cinema, a mural that walks, a Nomadic book. The Carrinho Multimidia is the technology of all that’s possible, street technology —if you can’t shoot your idea on film, do it with your mobile phone. The resolution of your idea does not matter, what matters is that you express it, share it, whether the support is digital or analogical—.

With a portable projector, tablet, cordless microphone, LED monitor, a mat for the computer mouse, stickers and posters, the Carrinho promotes performances, free classes, travelling installations, educational activities and marketing.

On the Carrinho Multimidia, languages are there to serve the exchange of information, memories, knowledge. No boundaries or hierarchies between them: a visual concept is worth as much as a textual, verbal or sensorial concept.

45 ¿De parte de quién? Call free
Locutorio Móvil
Josep-Maria Martín
Barcelona, Espanya
2003
www.josep-mariamartin.org

The Project Who’s Calling? Call Free: Mobile Telephone Centre arose from a number of thoughts regarding the proliferation of these telephone centres as a new urban phenomenon related with immigration and cultural movement.

The basis of the project was to create a travelling space which would lead to thought about communication, beyond the phenomenon of immigration. To promote a collective construction with anonymous citizens, a platform which would connect personal experiences and reveal social and urban functions and dysfunctions.
A mobile telephone centre was set up in the form of a caravan, where citizens were invited, on their everyday journeys, to call whoever they wanted, to anywhere in the world and do so free of charge. We asked the users to (voluntarily) convey and share excerpts of their life stories with the artists and thus take advantage of the experience of communicating to create fictional stories and film a video documentary.

The interior design of the caravan enabled dialogues, secrets and debates, etc., to be conveyed, different forms of communication between the users and writers, and the video producer and artist, who directed the project. The writers collected valuable material to create a fictional novel from this singular experience.

44 Orbit
Raumlabor
Friburg, Alemanya
2006-2011
www.raumlabor.net

The orbit is part of an integral strategy headed by the municipal theatre of Friburg which we conducted in the season of 2005/06. The new director, Barbara Mundel, was seeking a new way to define theatre in relation to the city, in the context of great social changes and bearing in mind the public funding cuts applied to culture. The Orbit was established as a place where the city and theatre could highlight their relationship and question new perspectives of the contents in the work produced together.

The project, with renewed themes and contents of Friburg’s municipal theatre, went all over the city to discover places and urban conflicts. The theatre seeks its history in the universe of the city. At the end of the first year, in June 2007, the project landed in the theatre. The Orbit is an expandable space module. It is the size of a container and therefore is easy to transport. The first year it was used as a kiosk, office, workshop, bar, serigraph screen, recording studio, house, research laboratory, greenhouse, discotheque, cinema and a newspaper publishing unit.

Between June 2006 and June 2007 it visited eleven places around Friburg. The journey took us to the outskirts and the centre, we landed in shopping centres, travelled to abandoned airports, moved to recently developed areas and to areas of great development in the 1970s, we visited the new university research departments and an old people’s home. Everywhere we went, the project was exhibited for one month.

We carried out surveys in the city centre with the residents of Friburg asking them about their relationship with the city, how they use it and which places they like to visit or avoid. We asked them about the most typical features and on their personal utopias. The result was the first psychological profile of the city of Friburg.

43 Trailer Talk
Sabrina Artel
Nova York, USA
2004-2011
www.trailertalk.net

Trailer Talk by Sabrina Artel is a live show, a public event and recording of a debate. The project is focused on a travelling caravan that explores passing conversations, interventions and narrative with the help of participants which meet there. Trailer Talk involves the art of conversation and the attempt to hold a dialogue among people. This conversation is the root of cultural sustainability and the project stimulates live public debates focused on culture and cultural democratic ideals by means of personal exchange.

Since 2003 Sabrina Artel has been driving her red and white 1965 trailer through streets, and to festivals and events. Wherever she parks, she unfolds her garden chairs in her “yard”, thus establishing a spontaneous site specific. Over the loudspeakers on the outside of the vehicle, people are invited to come inside and taste homemade cookies and witness a conversation. The guests sit with Sabrina around a kitchen table in the trailer and discuss local issues, while friends and neighbours look on and listen. Sabrina’s experience as a theatre artiste has shaped her way of seeing traditional journalism: her project is based on the inter-subjectivity between her and the other participants. Later, the participants and the general public can experience multimedia edition conversations, a format that adds another meaning to the experience. Sabrina Artel’s work seeks to find new strategies to convey information by means of finding the public art of conversation in the context of domestic life, or... is it the opposite? Trailer Talk explores how individuals come together in unique, productive ways while researching and constructing new personalities and defining the community.

42 CX Simulator
Felix Mathias Ott
Mataró, Espanya
Projecte no realitzat
www.felixmathiasott.com

The CX Can Xalant Simulator (CX-S) is an unstaged project, designed to take place in the surroundings of the Can Xalant cultural centre. This involves a modified caravan which has been turned into a travel simulator.
We video recorded the caravan’s route from the place it was exhibited across the city and back again to the starting point. This “circular route” was simultaneously shown on five projectors mounted on the windows of the caravan, which enables us to view movement when the caravan is stationary.

With the aid of the video and sound recording of the landscape of public space, the “here and now” of the city could be recorded, and without actually moving, the visitor invited into the CX-S can experiment the travel without any risk of suffering a road accident and without polluting the environment.

The screens show urban scenes, situations and images. By framing these in the simulator, the landscapes are open to interpretation and projection by each of the visitors.

The CX Can Xalant Simulator (CX-S) is interesting since it deals with issues of perception such as, for example, the phenomenon of travel sickness due to the movement occurring because there is a difference between the visually perceived movement and the sense of movement felt by the inner ear. The project is also interesting for providing the chance of experiencing the environment differently and discovering new perspectives which are not seen from other angles.

41 Unofficial
Tourism
Iñaqui Larrimbe
Madrid, Espanya
2009-2010
http://web.jet.es/larry/

Artist Iñaki Larimbe turned a caravan into an “unofficial” tourist office with the aim of attending the cultural consumers from abroad (i.e. tourists), by offering them plans and guides from this “office” which included alternative routes through Madrid.

The routes were designed by six people who are related to Madrid. Thus, Mauro Entrialgo and Adriana Herreros came up with the circuit “Bright neon advertisements”; Guillermo de Madrid organized an “Urban Art” route; Jimina Sabadú showed us public spaces where films had been shot; John Tones invited us to stroll around places where you can still find old slot machines; Santi Otxoa gave us a route called “Century-old taverns in Madrid”, and the collective Todo por la praxis invited us to become acquainted with the unusual urban human fauna of the neighbourhood called “Cañada real”.

In short, Unofficial Tourism aimed to be a project which responded in another way to the demand for cultural entertainment which the latest cultural policies have created while still anchored to social and economic principles.

40 Kunst
Station Triemli
Public Works
Zurich, Suïssa
2010-2011
www.publicworksgroup.net

Public works has designed a mobile communications space, archive and exhibition which are the basis for Kunst Station Triemli, a public art programme for the Triemli Municipal Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland. For the next ten years, this mobile structure will house and promote an array of creative projects for and with the hospital users.

Kunst Station Triemli comprises five features: a work station that rotates around a fixed archive and a storage unit; a unit with modular panels, rotating shelves, seats and display cabinets; a table with stools which can be stored underneath; a poster; a lectern with a large notebook to write or draw on and a trolley for technological equipment that can work as a pedestal.
For a period of six months an informal Project was conducted to design and exchange the hospital blankets.
Two artists and designers work together to adjust, invent, correct, embellish or help the users, visitors and staff of the hospital to design these blankets. In periods when there was no production, the blankets were displayed to be exchanged or loaned out.

Public works was also invited to carry out the design of the Kunst Station web page. Physical features of the station were used to structure the contents of the digital area.

39 L'Arxivador
Anna Recasens
Barcelona, Espanya
2008-2011
www.interraincognita.org

The filing cabinet is originally an idea by Anna Recasens with the help of Esteve Lopez, Ivan Garcia, Roger Huguet and Riccardo Massari. The filing cabinet is a travelling project used for collective work.

The filing cabinet was established in 2008 and since then has been used at different cultural events and taken on different forms: library, museum, garden, kitchen, information point and workshop. Its permanent collection of books and digital archives (the library of the filing cabinet) includes subjects related to art, ecology, botanicals, memory, thoughts on rural and urban themes, common areas, the community, etc. The filing cabinet is also gathering a data archive and is in touch with other collectives and projects which are working on similar subjects and is scheduled to work within a network based on exchanging know-how and resources. The activities and workshops it carries out are for all ages and public and they adapt to the available resources.

The filing cabinet is a project in progress. The sessions of open library are mainly conducted in public spaces for those who wish to make consultations or simply enjoy a relaxing moment, reading and exchanging. Due to its ability to be transported and since it takes up so little space it can adapt to any event, take part in activities within the school syllabus, be used as a complement at specialized seminars and workshops or be set up as an information point and exchange of knowledge in different contexts. The library exists thanks to donations made by artists, art centres, various organizations, individuals...

38 S.E.F.T.-1
Manned Exploration Railway Probe

Iván Puig i Andrés Padilla
Mèxic
2010
www.seft1.net

S.E.F.T.-1 (Manned Exploration Railway Probe in Spanish) is a trans-disciplinary art project, including public interaction and dissemination, which proposes exploring unused railway lines as a starting point for reflection and research; their historical importance, social implications, circumstances and current contexts. It approaches two poles of the social experiment of technology: their usefulness and demise. The S.E.F.T.-1 is a vehicle which is able to travel both overland and on rails; this exploratory probe aims to promote photography, video, audio and text originating from the meetings, landscape and infrastructure around the travels made, as well as interviews with those who settled close to the railway, etc. It transmits data on its website, www.seft1.net, in which one may monitor the conditions of the probe, its location, the routes covered on geo-positioned maps, see images and videos of its travels and access information on the context which is edited by a research team. This information is also shown in some of the towns it passes through. Exploring railway ruins highlights the failure of the promise of modernity and calls on the historical memory by showing the economic and political reasons for its abandonment. It both researches plans of dependency and obsolescence controlled by technology and how its features affect social processes. It reviews the collapse of the meta-story which preaches the positive relationship between science and social welfare.

37 Cronivichana
Colectivo Descarrilados
Cali, Colombia
2010
http://colectivodescarrilados.blogspot.com

Project held in the context of the Ensayos Públicos # 4 and # 5 at the Art Laboratory of San Agustín, Cuba. A go-kart –the Chivichana- covers the streets of San Agustín carrying generational handbooks. Each handbook includes information on the people that interact with the Chivichana and thus children, youths and adults can explain their lives in relation to the city and their habits.

36 Tren de los curados
Colectivo Descarrilados
La Habana, Cuba
2005
http://colectivodescarrilados.blogspot.com

Art management suggestion selected for the 7 Salón de Octubre (Cali) and the 40 Salón Nacional de Artistas (Bogota). The transporting of train carriages (abandoned and corroded by time) to the neighbourhood streets was the start of nine actions held over thirty consecutive days in homes, the park, corners of the neighbourhood; these carriages became the meeting point for children, youths and older citizens from the area who gave life to Photo of you, Come to the neighbourhood, Mecatearte, The Neighbourhood’s Skin, Parquearte, Memory, Art and Sports, Stories of the Neighbourhood and 7th of August 1956.

35 Canómada
Colectivo Descarrilados
Cali, Colombia
2008-2009
http://colectivodescarrilados.blogspot.com

Project invited to the 41 Salón Nacional de Artistas held in Cali, Colombia in 2008. For two months, the canoe navigated between several villages along the River Cauca, carrying objects and messages which provided poetical relationships among the villagers. Canomadar: Action of navigating –exchanging – inhabiting – indicating – relating – going on trips. The canoe was a register of meetings; the river, a symbol of movement and life.

34 Serenata en las ruinas
Kabaret Machine
Cali, Colombia
2011

For this Project we hired a chiva, which is a typical vehicle in the city of Cali, a kind of bus adapted in such a way that people can drink and dance on it while it passes through the city. The local tourists use this kind of vehicle to visit tourist areas by doing a round of the discotheques at night.

We covered a special route with our chiva, which carried us to those places of no interest to anyone. During one afternoon we passed through places that either no longer exist, are abandoned or in the process of being demolished. With serenades as a musical backdrop, the passengers on the chiva made sketches and penned texts in situ, and which were later hung on those temporary metal fences which are used to fence off these places that are becoming extinct.

As a rule, serenades are used as a way to recover a lost love. The route of this serenade highlighted places that once had been signs of good times and development in the city, and which are now being demolished in the name of progress.

33 Escuela Panamericana del Desasosiego
Pablo Helguera
Mèxic
2003-2011
www.panamericanismo.org

The Pan American School of Anxiety is an independent non profit art project which began in 2003, and aims to create links among the different regions of America based on discussions, performances, workshops, video shows, interventions and short- and long-term collaborations among individuals and organizations. Its main feature consisted of a portable architectural structure in the shape of a rural school in which several activities were carried out. The foldable structure was placed in a van with the aim of travelling overland across the whole hemisphere, from Anchorage, Alaska, to Ushuaia, Tierra del Fuego.

The project’s aim was to contact a wide variety of people and involve them at different levels. By using several strategies, the aim was to start up a dialogue which covered subjects with local interest related with history, ideology and lines of thought of the Americas, as well as cultural and art problems.

The Pan American School of Anxiety responds to the needs of supporting interregional communication among the Spanish- English- and Portuguese speaking Americas, as well as other communities in the Caribbean and elsewhere, providing links beyond today’s commercial and economic exchanges among these regions. The project, which in its physical trips across the hemisphere tried to literalize the same notion of pan Americanism, is inspired on the travel itineraries of many of those who crossed the continent, ranging from explorers, missionaries, scientists, revolutionaries, intellectuals, writers, and so on.

32 Centro Cultural Nomade
a77
Buenos Aires, Argentina
2011
www.centroculturalnomade.blogspot.com

El Centro Cultural Nómade és un contenidor portuari en desús transformat en un mòdul flexible que permet múltiples accions en l’espai públic en contacte amb les institucions socials i educatives de cadascun dels llocs per on fa la seva travessia. En pocs metres quadrats nombroses possibilitats d’acció: una biblioteca, una galeria d’art, un teatre i una escola, a través del mobiliari construït especialment amb material reciclat provinent d’embalatges de la indústria automotriu.

Aquesta proposta s’encadena amb un seguit d’accions i intervencions anteriors desenvolupades per a77, que prengueren com a objectiu l’acostament de l’art, l’urbanisme i l’arquitectura a diferents comunitats a través de l’estímul de les seves capacitats artístiques i creatives, el foment de la seva participació en decisions sobre projectes urbans i culturals reals, i el missatge de la reutilització i el reciclatge amb l’objectiu d’incorporar-lo amb imaginació a la vida de tots els dies.

El concepte del reaprofitament de recursos no sols opera com una matèria global de l’actual auge de la sostenibilitat —moltes vegades banalitzat des de la seva incorporació a les estratègies de la societat de consum— ; és pot ser una entrada d’identitat a valorar com a part de la nostra pròpia idiosincràsia.

El Centro Cultural Nómade està realitzant en aquests moments activitats artístiques i culturals per a la comunitat en el seu recorregut per Buenos Aires amb l’objectiu primordial de desenvolupar i implementar estratègies culturals d’accés i inclusió social dirigides a habitants de la històricament postergada zona sud de la ciutat.

32 Centro Cultural Nomade
a77
Buenos Aires, Argentina
2011
www.centroculturalnomade.blogspot.com

The Centro Cultural Nómade is an abandoned sea container which has been transformed into a flexible module and can house various events in public spaces in collaboration with social and educational institutions in every place it passes through. In just a few square metres can be held numerous kinds of events: a library, art gallery, theatre and even a school, thanks to the specially built furniture using recycled material from automobile industry packaging.

This project is linked to a series of previous actions and interventions carried out by a77, which aim to bring art, urban planning and architecture closer to various communities thanks to the stimulus provided by their artistic and creative skills, encouraging participation in decisions regarding real urban projects and cultures, and the message of reuse and recycling with the aim of imaginatively incorporating it into everyday life.
The principle of reusing resources not only works as a global subject of our present focus on sustainability —quite often dismissed by its use in strategies carried out by our consumer society— ; can become an entrance of identity to be weighed up as part of our own idiosyncrasy.

The Centro Cultural Nómade is presently carrying out artistic and cultural activities for the community in its travels through Buenos Aires with the main aim of developing and implementing cultural strategies to foment access to these and social inclusion aimed at those people from the historically disregarded southern area of the city.

31 Temescal Seed Swap
Marksearch
Oakland, USA
2005-2011
www.marksearch.org

We created Temescal Seed Swap in 2005 in response to our insatiable habit of collecting seeds while walking the dog in our neighbourhood. Temescal is one of the smallest neighbourhoods in Oakland, California. Our cart is made of recycled materials which we found here and there: perforated tablex—a highly resistant kind of conglomerate—; wood from the local store that recently closed down; wheels and old tyres from one of our old bicycles; Springs from a mattress which someone happened to leave on our sidewalk and an old, hand made bell. This seed exchanger is now a travelling event in our community: we visit local street fairs, neighbourhood feasts and the farmers’ market in Temescal. We still collect seeds with the help of our faithful dog Chica, which carries a special basket made from one of our old raincoats.

The neighbours share flower seeds, vegetables and garden products, and also stories on the neighbourhood gardens. As they exchange seeds, they usually write stories on plants. One woman gave us some historical seeds which had been passed down from generation to generation in her family. She traced the line of seeds back to the first settlers in the north eastern region of the US. Our stock is constantly changing and includes biological seeds from plants that grow well in the Californian microclimate: beans, beetroot, red leaf lettuce, rocket, coriander, grass, peas, California golden poppies, poppies, mesclun, equinatia, Nile lilies, marigolds, corn cockle, mallows and a cosmos of mixtures, cornflower and scabious.

30 Museo Ambulante
Theo Craveiro
Sao Paulo, Brasil
2010
theocraveirotrabalhos.tumblr.com

The Travelling Museum is an exhibition platform that enables different configurations in the field of art to be presented. The challenge is to understand the subject of art not only as a picture on the wall but as a series of relationships surrounding it. The strategy is to create a personal system with the aim of encouraging these relationships. This exhibition platform was first used as part of the project “Strategies of circulation”, a series of initiatives which aimed to enable different ways to exhibit works. The challenge was to invent a way to show on line the works presented with verbal contact with the official circuit. Unlike what occurs in the exhibition rooms or art awards, where only one work can be shown at a time, it was possible to present a series of things and a way of thinking. Each time this platform is used, the challenge is to update its meaning and find a way to converse with the context. In future we aim to receive projects from other artists and occupy new spaces.

The aim is to do it differently, break down the limits and mix up the roles. This is not about being in favour or against the institutions, but to state that there are always other places and ways. If the conditions offered are limited, you can create your own system and offer another universe. The main point is the declaration of possibility.

29 Open-roulotte radio
LaFundició
Ripollet, Espanya
2008-2011
http://open-roulotte.pbworks.com

Open-roulotte is a process to collectively design, build and manage a light, mobile infrastructure which provides those individuals and collectives who so require this with the organization of events in public spaces in the neighbourhood of Can Mas (Ripollet). The task of designing and building this light, mobile infrastructure as well as the process of training a citizen’s organization in charge of managing it is closely linked to a collaborative research action process on the present and/or possible uses of public spaces.

Open-roulotte has staged several processes carried out side by side with various collectives and action groups with whom we have established different ways to work. In the context of schools, the work processes may be divided into three moments which overlap and are constantly mixed: 1. Exploration: the territory as a subject of study, common area and “wall-less classes”; drifting as a way or technique to proceed. 2. Cartography: cartography as a non objective of collective representation of the territory. Representation as a pretext and vehicle of debate on subjects that affect the territory. 3. Dialogue: conversations on the knowledge generated and negotiating actions to be taken in each point /moment.

28 Wikitankers
Taller QUAM 2011 WIKPOLIS. Cartografies i construccions col·lectives de l’espai social de arquitecturas colectivas
Straddle3/ Todo por la Praxis
Vic, Espanya
2011
www.acvic.org

The WikiTankers are various units that were built during a workshop organized in July 2011 by the ACVic Centre d’Arts Contemporànies on collective architectures that were made using recycled materials.

The aim of WikiTankers is to create Nomadic-like, mobile structures, in situations of emerging mobility of citizens. As we have seen throughout the years in different cities and towns as well as other places around the world how the process of mobility arises, and this makes the construction of mobile units of buildings and structures necessary, not only as features of support from these mobilizations but also as driving forces of situations. The units we built are as follows: InfoTanker (a specific request by members of the camping group in Vic as a substitute for the present information office), MediaTanker (technological, internet-wifi, communication, media point, etc.), GastroTanker (the kitchen), AgroTanker (urban vegetable garden as a support and provider of food for cooking), BarraTanker (meeting point as a support for MediaTanker or GastroTanker, with units of furniture).

27 Imprenta Móvil
Nuria Montiel
Mèxic
2010-2011

The Mobile Press, built to fit the structure of a travelling cart can be set up anywhere, and has been designed as a social means of expression where the press is the device that builds up collective dialogue. The idea of taking the device to the streets and placing it at the disposal of passers-by, arose from my own research to occupy public space with a political stance which vindicates the way we appropriate this and the way we communicate with it.

I’m interested in graphics due to their rebellious nature, for the role they have played in uprisings by propagating revolutionary ideas, demands, pleas and requirements, providing revolutionaries with a written voice. This is the case of Taller de Gràfica Popular (TGP) in Mexico which throughout the post-revolutionary era, despite its demagoguery, was paramount to workers’ causes and anti fascists of the period with their production of posters, flyers and newspapers.

The graphics workshops at the Autonomous University of México (UNAM) are another immediate reference point in my work. It does not overlook the discursive role achieved by the Students Movement in 1968. In these workshops the students used carbon copiers to print the flyers which were used to inform the public about murders which had taken place, the subjects covered during students meetings and were also used to announce political rallies and protest marches. Another workshop that was paramount to the success was the Taller Popular de Serigrafia made up of a Group of visual artists who were involved in the context of the movements and social struggles which affected Argentina from 2002 to 2007. The graphic work created by these workshops in such different periods was a means of collective expression which led to iconography that still stands for those times of social conflict. And thus I believe it is important to vindicate the power of the press as a tool that is closely linked to activism and social struggle.

Throughout this process I have developed a methodology of creation which involved people from outside the world of art, based on the interaction of the workshop with the city and the people who live there, taking the cart and seeking various communities, economic, political and social contexts that make up a town.

26 M.E.T
Floating Lab Collective
Washington DC, USA
2010-2011
www.floatinglabcollective.org

The Modular Engagement Transporter (MET) is modelled on the NASA Modular Equipment Transporter used on the Apollo missions to document the surface of the moon. The MET, referred to as the “rickshaw” by the astronauts was a cart outfitted with pneumatic tyres that carried geological tools, cameras and sample cases on the lunar surface.

Floating Lab Collective has recreated this device to explore the surfaces of our planet that have become alien to us, specifically areas such as BP’s oil spill along the Gulf of Mexico; the mountain top removal sites of Appalachia or even our own neighbourhoods or communities which, due to an alienating culture and society, have lost their sense of public spaces and solidarity.

The MET is equipped with four digital cameras, projectors, speakers, a backdrop, a pull out table and chairs coated in chalk board paint to encourage meetings and project planning, and also storage space with specific equipment for each project. The MET is thus a conglomerate of documentary tools to explore the aesthetics of alienation and to show the meetings with communities and landscapes.

The MET made its first expedition to Louisville, Kentucky, with the aid and funding of the University of Louisville, and explored several social change initiatives. The outcome is a series of portraits, drawings and diagrams based on these meetings.

25 Biblioteca de Nezahualcoyótl
Diego Pérez
Mèxic DF, Mèxic
2006
www.diegoperez.org

The Nezahualcóyotl library is a collection of books that I have bought in the markets of materials retrieved from the landfills of Nezahualcóyotl and Iztapalapa, neighbouring areas on the eastern side of Mexico city, where all the waste materials and scrap from the various landfills in the city end up, and where all the waste water leaves the city, in stretches along open sewers. Places that are environmentally devastated. Most of the things are collected by the recyclers and put on sale again in poor areas.

For years I found sought after books at bargain prices with which I could recreate the universal and Mexican history of literature. It is important to highlight that Nezahualcóyotl, who was lord of Texcoco and a poet, in the years prior to the conquest of Mexican territories by Spain had an extensive collection of codex and literary documents which were robbed and later burned by the Catholics.

The cart format that was used by the book collection was inspired by the model of the waste collectors; it is worth noting that scrap is still collected at Nezahualcóyotl with carts pulled by mules and horses which cover the town street by street.

The work is also a tribute to the Prince and poet Nezahualcóyotl, an honourable personage who we now know was greatly concerned with the environment and now lends his name to a place completely degraded by our disaffection with nature.

24 La Maquila Región 4
Amor Muñoz
Mèxic
2010-2012
www.amormunoz.net
Maquilas are work centres whose activities focus on the production of textiles and electronics intended for export, which is the necessary condition for their existence; they enjoy a special, advantageous tax regime which allows them to import goods without paying import duties and to export with a duty paid by Mexico. Another key feature is that they operate under the globalizing concept “of taking advantage of being competitive” which in this case means cheap Mexican labour,  who are mostly women.
The Maquila Región 4 is a project which reflects on the processes of the textile and electronics maquilas. It is a mobile, extendible device which works like workshop, for the community manufacturing of textile and electronic goods in public areas.

In the Maquila Región 4, expanded graphics are made in groups, some of which are functional and others, simply, with imaginary classic electronics (PCB’S, schemes, electronic circuits, etc.). This leads us to make an analysis on the implications of work related with the collective imagination of technology, thus linking it to jobs related to manual work such as embroidery and electronics.

Each participant will receive some remuneration for his or her work, base don a scheme where the hourly wage of Mexicans is paid the same as in the USA. The artist and participants enter into an individual labour contract according to each work, and the time they are willing to work.

23 Fiteiro Cultural (Culture kiosk)
Fabiana de Barros
João Pessoa, Brasil
1998-2011
www.fiteirocultural.org

Fiteiro Cultural is a public and contextual work of art. In the north of Brazil, “Fiteiro” means kiosk or street stall. The owner of the stall sells specific products to his patrons. This relationship with the public inspired me to create my own Fiteiro dedicated to culture and art. Since the Fiteiro Cultural is foldable and light it is a “Nomadic” structure for artists, a “non space” which depends on the community where it is set up to survive and the aid of various artists.

The Discovery of the other is the meeting point between the artist and the community in which the Fiteiro is placed beginning a creative process. This is what I mean when I mention a “social sculpture”. In accordance with the wishes or needs of the community, the cultural Fiterio may be made into a workshop, a showroom or exhibition hall, a theatre stage, a place for public or private debates, or it can just be an area to rest in and think. This work is constantly changing: with no beginning or end, no evolution and no ideal shape.

Thus, its name may be appraised and translated into several languages depending on the cities where it is set up: João Pessoa, Athens, Sion, New York, Havana, Erevan, São Paulo, Dunkirk, Larissa, Milan, Geneva, Biel and Second Life.

22 Fala dos confins
Virginia de Medeiros
Sao Paulo, Brasil
2010
www.faladosconfins.com.br

Every city has its own language, business, values, ways of thought, habits... an empirical order used by its inhabitants to build their identity.

Fala des confins is an audio installation which sprang from a dialogue with a number of popular poets, popular tales and stories, legends and people in general who turn the act of speaking into a creative art. The aim of the project is to become directly involved in the oral repertoire of people who live in the area.

Fala de confins is an audio installation which acts directly in the area of Bacia do Jacuípe, Sertão da Bahia, and covers the cities of Pé de Serra, New Fátima, Riachão do Jacuípe, cities close to Feira de Santana, and Portal do Sertão, where it first appeared.

The installation consists of projecting on these dry, mute places the traditional tales and legends that were told by the popular poets, always told by those who saw the act of speaking as something creative.

The identity of the place is changed with this intervention by broadening the oral repertoire of those who live in the area.

21 Le CNA Dans les villages
Cinéma Numérique Ambulant (CNA)
Bénin, Burkina Faso, Mali, Níger i França
2004- 2007
www.c-n-a.org

Cinéma Numérique Ambulant (CNA) is an international network of mobile cinemas which has set up their projection units in Cameroon, Madagascar, Senegal and Togo.

The CNA sets up these units in rural areas with no access to electricity and with no knowledge of the world of cinema. The films are always free.

The projections are essentially African feature films, the rights to which have been acquired. The first part of these film shows is carried out in collaboration with the main NGO institutions and organizations which aim to disseminate social issues: International Plans, the High Commissions in the fight against AIDS, decentralized cooperation...

With the technological and technical breakthroughs in mind, the CNA constantly examines the ways to improve the quality of their projects, whether these are digital innovations in the field of image and sound, mobility or safety.

Through their educational projects of image such as Studio Numérique Ambulant (SNA) or the School of Image, CNA tries to share its technical and artistic knowledge and skills to a mainly young public.

20 RallyConurbano
RallyConurbano
Gran Buenos Aires, Argentina
2004-2009
http://rallyconurbano.com.ar

RallyConurbano is the name of the group and project modelled on exploring and experimenting with time and urban public spaces. The journey through places affected by conflict, the arguments that arise spontaneously and the interdisciplinary reflections raised generate a critical thought via a collective static experiment. The various chronicles, comments, photos and opinions are later uploaded and shared on a blogsite, another “virtual” discussion exchange platform.

RallyConurbano is a travelling, foldable, informal laboratory of social micro urban planning, including research and training, an exploration of collective physical territory and also open to discussion. Our experiments first decide on a place to visit and add a series of questions or doubts raised by the place. Here the role of the experts is not like that of tourist guides but rather catalysers of collective research.

RallyConurbano tries to find the problems of social relationships in the context of a collective trip (project).
Prior to constructing a building, RallyConurbano builds up a non-permanent relationship among the hikers taking part. In any case, RallyConurbano can construct social buildings, a many sheeted unstable and utopian building, and a self-structure that is jocularly unstable.

19 Puck Cinema
Caravana
Toni Tomàs i Carles Porta
Bellpuig, Espanya
2009-2011
www.puckcinema.com

Tombs Creatius is a company that creates games and is led by Toni Tomàs, artisan and creator of the project. In 2000 I decided to leave the La Baldufa Company of Comedians, which I had founded and worked in for four years, and I began the project Tombs Creatius. Thus for over ten years, Tombs Creatius has devised, designed and crafted wooden street toys and games for all ages.
In 2009, working cheek by jowl with Carles Porta we coproduced Puck Cinema Caravan, the smallest cinema on earth. At Tombs Creatius we believe streets are places to play because they have always been a place for socializing and recreation and, they are losing this function nowadays. That is why our projects have filled many squares, streets, school playgrounds and festivals in many towns.

Puck is a caravan which can turn into a cinema. It has wheels and can go anywhere. It projects animated films like the ones not usually shown on television. It selects films from all over the world relentlessly seeking out the vast collections produced by the movies over time. The menu is varied but select. It is specially aimed at the spirit.

The objective is to capture new animated film lovers. Or simply recover the experience of a particular type of cinema, for a moment to enjoy getting close to a small but great audiovisual work.

18 Caravana Natura
Nuria Güell
Vidreres, Espanya
2006
www.nuriaguell.net

Caravana Natura is a service that offers one the chance to live in a caravan on one’s own and was set up in an unspoilt forest far from any contact with the city life, which one could only experience alone. The caravan had several recording devices: a camera, a video camera, a notebook and a voice recorder. The documentation was only created when the users decided to leave a clue on their experience. Caravana Natura was designed as a space for introspection and a getaway, creating a space of poetical resistance in a society where time, it seems, can only be productive, offering the subject available time, free use of the caravan according to the needs and desires of each person. This leads one to reconsider one’s own identity from other angles of recognition, far from the confusion and determinist consumerism which reigns in the city.

17 Camping, caravaning, arquitecturing
Miquel Ollé and Sofia Mataix
Barcelona, Espanya
2011

Camping, caravaning, arquitecturing empirically and humanly documents and analyzes the architectures created in campsites, where each patron designs, builds and personalizes the area according to his or her needs, bearing in mind the main functions are leisure, rest and recreational and social activities.

Thus we can see from a habitable module, which works as an initial investment (tent, caravan, etc.), how campers structure the extension of their dwellings in a flexible and temporary way.

Patrons become architects, designers, building according to their needs at that time and their budget, and often recycle and change the uses of their furniture and fittings of their main homes.

The close proximity of the plots, the open aspect of their dwellings and the recreational and relaxed nature foster social relationships among neighbours, and actions which in everyday life are done in the privacy of their homes become public and shared ones (eating, personal hygiene, siestas, etc.).

The earlier form of the CX-R evokes the function it was designed for and, as an extension of the museum, does justice to the idea of modular, flexible and temporary architecture. In the first stage of the project it was used as a laboratory for collecting and managing data en route. In the second stage, it was turned into an exhibition area of processed data.

16 We Can Xalant
a77, Pau Faus
Mataró, Espanya
2009
http://wecanxalant.blogspot.com

The project We Can Xalant: Laboratory of Nomadic architectures and self-construction first decided to reinterpret the old construction devised by Tadeshi Kawamata in the courtyard of Can Xalant (known as the “Mataró kiosk”), and then to develop a mobile unit seen as an extension of the institution itself towards the public space. This was a collective construction project, formed by a network of institutions and people representing the most immediate surroundings of the Centre Can Xalant.
This is how new analytical strategies and involvement in the area were developed, collaborative dynamics were also explored and new reflections on mobile, flexible architectural structures were presented for commercial uses. The Laboratory was seen as a social-constructive process based on both physical construction and outlining programmes and an agenda of activities which was set in place for the continuity throughout time of the aforementioned architectures.

The final result was the construction of a new architectural complex —mobile and static— seen as an emblematic feature as regards its surroundings. The materials used came from the ruins of the old structure and from the nearby waste recycling plant. Following the structure’s completion, the complex has been given several uses and activities within the Can Xalant programme. Also, the New Mobile Unit (CX-R) has enabled the centre to develop projects linked to public spaces, both in Mataró and other towns.

15 S.P.O.T.
(Public Service to Optimize Junk)
Makea tu vida
Vic, Espanya
2011
www.makeatuvida.net


S.P.O.T. // Public Service to Optimize Junk is a mobile, temporary public workshop, which travelled through the streets of Vic and Torelló for a fortnight offering a free advice service and aid to repair, reuse and creatively transform pieces of junk into something new.
S.P.O.T. is a place where people can bring their objects to be repaired, and has community equipment and professionals to advise and provide guidance on techniques regarding transformation.

S.P.O.T. combines the aspects of a do-it-yourself and media workshop with a meeting point where knowledge, ideas and tricks are exchanged, and is an area of creation and debate on environmental policies, rational consumerism, recycling and waste, a place where one may think of alternatives and new habits.
With S.P.O.T. we first wanted to study the feasibility and acceptance of a permanent repair and transformation workshop and later to bring together the different agents who currently work in related activities (waste management, public participation, employment, creative recycling, etc.) so as to formalize the possible process of setting up this service.

We humbly believe that S.P.O.T. has worked and been surprising, both due to the use of the service made by the public, and the interest and involvement of all those who have worked on developing the project.

This project would not have been possible without the help of: Jordi Boadas, Fabiola, Guiomar, Assumpta, Alan, Cristina, Bruna, Feliu, Fina Torelló, Quim Clos, Elisenda Soler, Carles Furriols, Ingrid, Sandra, La Torratxa... Thanks to you all.

14 Centers of the USA
The Center for Land Use Interpretation
California, USA
2010
www.clui.org

Centers of the USA is an exhibition produced by the Institute of Marking and Measuring and the non profit organization CLUI, Centre for Land Use Interpretation, which opened on 14 August 2010. The exhibition lies within a CLUI Unit (mobile unit) which was temporarily set up at the dead centre of the USA, to the north of Lebanon, Kansas. The exhibition portrays and describes the nation’s various “centres”, such as the geodesic centre, in Lucas, Kansas and the geographic centre, close to Belle Fourche, South Dakota.

A telephone number on the door informs the visitors about where there have to call to obtain the access code to unblock the entrance, a technique used in several exhibition areas managed by the organization. The trailer, which was also used as a shelter by the members of the local roads department, has been visited by hundreds of people in the last six months. The place where the mobile unit is located is, in a way, an historical relic, since it is placed at the very centre of the 48 adjoining states, and is a popular place for those who wish to reach the very core of things.

The project is part of the CLUI Lines of Site Thematic programme, a constant series of presentations on topography, cartographic lines, perimeters and borders. The project was made possible thanks to support from the Salina Art Center, Creative Capital, The Hub Club of Lebanon in Kansas and the Institute of Marking and Measuring (IMAM).

13 Mobile Stealth Unit 002
Beth Coleman i Howard Goldkrand
Nova York, USA
1999
www.soundlab.org

The Mobile Stealth Unit 002 (MSU) is a DROID (robot) which retrieves and disseminates data. In order to build this unit, a delivery tricycle was turned into an INPUT/OUTPUT device using new technological media. The unit works like a mobile broadcast station. The MSU is both a sound sculpture in situ and a web based project, where the users are able to control a live camera connected to the front of the vehicle and hear an audio broadcast. Its aesthetic principles range from Futurism to the culture of the Californian Low Riders —who tune vintage cars both as a way to differentiate themselves and as a message to society—, to found or readymade art, robotics and also homemade sound systems. The unit works like an artefact and a broadcasting device which disseminates sound information and gathers visual data.

The MSU is cordless and fully operational as a mobile data distribution mechanism and collector of samples. It has an internal, rechargeable long-life battery to reproduce the sound. It also features a computer and a local area network (LAN) linked to an Ethernet port for broad band Internet connection. This portable device constantly receives an audio broadcast from an MP3 sound file which is programmed by the creators. The computer sound signal is sent via radio frequency (local within a range of a mile) to the sound system. The unit’s radio receiver sends the broadcast flow by means of a homemade 1,800 watt sound system. The unit’s “data collection” system is carried out via a camera mounted on the upper part of the unit which broadcasts a live signal from the laptop computer to the Web, where spectators can make different camera movements to view the whole area from the viewpoint of the driver.

12 Kitchen Monument
Raumlabor
Duisburg, Mülheim, Hamburg, Warschau, Giessen, Berlín,
Hannover, Liverpool
2006-2011
www.kuechenmonument.de
www.raumlabor.net

Kitchen Monument is a changing mobile sculpture. The sculpture is a sheet of steel that can be made into a traditional collective space when the balloon covering it is inflated. The new space can house several activities at once. Kitchen Monument becomes a prototype for building temporary communities.

The project has visited several towns. It stops in potentially underrated places, non-areas that seem to have lost their urban functions. The balloon is placed anywhere it fits and its transparency promotes a dialogue between the inside and outside: everything is blurred but also visible. A new area is created within this existing space and, in this way new qualities are allowed to appear. The Trojan horse is a good metaphor for our project since we use the monument to create urban identity. This mobile structure highlights the specific qualities of the place and enables people to actively work together to recreate a public space by providing new features.

Kitchen Monument approaches the subject of sustainability on an urban and architectural scale. It is designed to work as a tool to reactivate and use public spaces. Its main characteristic is that it only expands where and when necessary, while only using up one parking space and consumes no natural resources. It only becomes a public building in accordance with a specific activity in a specific place and can comfortably house one hundred and twenty people in practically any climatic conditions.

11 Spacebuster
Raumlabor
Nova York, USA
2009
www.raumlabor.net

Spacebuster was developed and designed to explore public space in New York. It is a research tool that acts like a transformer of architecture and social space within the urban space.

Spacebuster is modelled upon the basis of a delivery van with a large inflatable area which comes out of the back of the vehicle and can hold up to eighty people. The inflatable structure is translucent so the people inside can see what’s going on outside and vice versa. The fabric acts like a semi-permeable border between that which is public and private. Thus, the area turns into a backdrop of the scene viewed from inside and the Spacebuster into a stage, as if it were a public theatre play. The local projections can be seen on the fabric both from outside and inside. Depending on the programme held on  the Spacebuster, the area can be furnished with different fittings (writing desks, seats or tables).

Travelling through Manhattan and Brooklyn for nine consecutive nights, Spacebuster organized several events which were the result of collaboration with Raumlabor Berlin, Storefront for Arts and Architecture and different local art institutions, non profit organizations and communities. The mixture of the most formal formats —workshops, lectures, projections— with easy to follow daily activities such as dinners, bar service and parties, provided a special ambience and they were also used to highlight what was going on in the public space.

10 UMPA
Unitat Mòbil de Prèstecs d´Art
Cristian Añó i David Armengol
Barcelona, Espanya
2004

MALU is a project that considers an act of appropriating the formal codes of how a library works and applying them to the visual formats typical of objects of art. In this way, the fourth module of Mobile Museums becomes a space which promotes the possibility of exchanging, transporting and consuming contemporary art production, thus involving itself in the social fabric which makes up the public sphere of Can Fabra.

Beyond the usual systems of receiving the work of art, MALU tests other formulas of access to art creation, leaving out the agents running the art system, who are now being seen from a critical viewpoint in a utopian, naive attempt to subvert the mechanisms of the middleman (merchant) between works of art and the public with the aim of giving the public the final responsibility when faced with the exhibition event.
With this change of art practices, a new rational area of literature and the library system is created at the centre, and a new relational area where all the usual categories that define the art circuit are in a state of preventive art suspension.

At the MALU space you can find video works, poly-poetical actions, performances to stage, take photographs, see paintings, drawings, installations... both at home and in the same area.

09 The Floating Museum
Floating Lab Collective
Washington DC, USA.
2009-2011
www.floatinglabcollective.org

The Floating Museum originated in the Floating Lab Collective, a group of artists from the metropolitan area of Washington DC, who use public space as a context for their reflection and creations. The Floating Museum was designed as a mobile space derived from the collective’s experiences as citizens.

It consists of a van, similar to the travelling vans that sell food, transformed so that it can provide an area for exhibitions, performances, projections, meetings and projects. The museum analyzes how art institutions can design actions that include a society that is in constant motion which moves and expands toward the outskirts.

The Floating Museum sees mobility in the context of social and economic parameters. Firstly, mobility is paramount to being an immigrant. The presence of immigrants triggers a series of social and spatial movements and their movements transform the urban landscape. Examples of how immigrants adapt are community centres that provide social services and programmes or the vans that sell “tacos” and travel from worksite to worksite, along paths without sidewalks created by the immigrant workers who travel there from the outskirts. The Floating Lab Collective is interested in these workers who travel from the outskirts to the city centre every day, and see urban spaces as aggressive and conflictive and explore the affects of this mobility on our cities, for instance, changing traffic flows and transforming the city’s weather and space.

08 Burn Station
Platoniq
Mèxic DF, Bogotà, Madrid, Berlín, París,
Marsella, Florència, Bruselas, Lima, Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, Estrasburg, Cambridge, Xangai
2004-2011
www.platoniq.net
www.burnstation.net

Burn Station: Featuring the production and free distribution of net labels music and net-radio programmes. Self-service distribution in public spaces. Dissemination of information on free audio licences, formats and collaboration networks.

In a space open to the public, an audio file consultation and downloading point is set up with different net labels and net-radios. The users/publishers may make a selection of files, record them on a CD-R and take them home.

Burn Station is based on the development of software for the GNU/Linux operating system and a local server. This free distribution/dissemination audio-text kit works as a self service for digital contents. It is a data base for mp3 and text that automates the process of selecting, recording and printing files. The Burn Station software has been distributed under free licence since September 2004.

07 La Fanzinoteca Ambulant
Lluc Mayol, Matias Rossi, Ricardo Duque
Barcelona, Espanya
2005-2011
www.fanzinoteca.net

The Travelling Fanzineotheque is a travelling reference module which contains a collection of fanzines, hand made books and other publications that are hard to define and was inspired by the fanzinoteca de Saladestar, a reading room which was located in the neighbourhood of Gràcia in Barcelona between 2005 and 2007.

When the Saladestar closed down in 2007, we decided to make a cardboard module, on the structure of a table tennis table with wheels we had found in the street. This module can carry some five-hundred fanzines approximately and has a computer with which to check the data base.

The project began with the aim of taking this module to different public areas to create mobile reference points and offer parallel activities related with self-managed publications and small publishers.
Meanwhile the Fanzineotheque carries out research on this kind of publications with the aim of publishing its fanzines named Minca and La pequeña Minca Ilustrada, besides being involved in the “Jamzines”, or open practical workshops where participants can find an array of materials to spontaneously make a publication themselves, guided by the Fanzineotheque team.
The Fanzineotheque currently has six-hundred and eighty issues listed and over eight-hundred issues yet to be listed, which can be consulted in Santa Eulàlia Street in Barcelona, when the module is not travelling.

06 Museo de la Defensa de Madrid
Tom Lavin
Madrid, Espanya
2007
www.antimuseo.org

The Defence Museum in Madrid is part of a reflection on the memory and identity of Spanish society, which I began after returning from Mexico in 2001. It all started with a subterranean presence, which is related to my previous project on mass graves: an air raid shelter below Juan Bautista Street in Toledo, quite close to where the Ojo Atómico headquarters lay between 2003 and 2007. This shelter was closed for almost seventy years and practically everyone had forgotten about it.

My first idea was to work on the same location, taking advantage of the symbolic potential provided by its hidden existence, but I suddenly realized that the defence of Madrid is an historical event that far surpassed the one I originally had for the shelter, and I thought of a fiction museum to which I resorted for several ideas. The first was to mobilize citizens and seek the support of several groups to vindicate the establishment of the museum in the Prosperidad neighbourhood, with the specific reference point of the shelter. The second idea was a temporary museum in an empty space in the Prosperidad market. This where the vindictive action would be combined with the museum’s “temporary headquarters”.

I finally decided on a travelling museum. An object that had sculptural features, but would only be activated as a performance where people could interpret both its artistic and political scope. I approached the fragility of historical memory in an object that was hard to define. Furthermore I discovered an infinite number of small marks left by the war which the dictatorship had failed to erase. A travelling museum would be able to reveal these marks in situ and re-interpret the urban space.

05 CPAC
Centro Portátil de Arte Contemporáneo Antimuseo
Mèxic DF, Mèxic
2009-2011
www.antimuseo.org

On a practical level, the Antimuseum has evolved from a “conventional” model of alternative space where the focus was on the needs of artists, and on creating a physical, discursive and social area of the hegemonic to provide a number of conditions of creative freedom that do not exist in other areas, to a model focused on the public. That is, it aims to now create an area where the public is shaped around subaltern discourses, creating a channel for these discourses and providing a way to get one’s hands on (counter) publics.

As a consequence, the Antimuseum projects have developed physical and methodological participation devices, usually aimed at specific subjects such as gender violence or historical memory used to compare the discourse produced with a heterodox arts management practice. The PCAC is the most notable and effective result of this research.

The Portable Contemporary Art Centre is a low-cost mobile device designed to test new experiments in the field of visual arts. Its function is to both detonate creative processes and “mark” the urban fabric.
The PCAC creates a link between the strategies of re-appropriation of public space by disadvantaged collectives —racial minorities, travelling salesmen, prostitutes, immigrants, homosexuals in repressive contexts, certain women’s collectives ... —and art practices which directly affect the city.

04 Mesa Rodante
Móvil
Adriana García Galán
Beirut, Líban
2005
http://nomargen.free.fr

This project consists of a revolving round table, with four live microphones with amplifiers and designed to travel through the city of Beirut while discussing previously selected subjects based on surveys made with the public. The voices of those who are arguing are linked by an intricate system of cables between each microphone, thus making eye contact difficult. People with opposing views on different subjects are invited to take part, and topics can be specific ones on the city or different views on general subjects. The sessions were recorded in video to be later played in public.

03 Museo de la Calle
Colectivo Cambalache
Bogotà, Colombia
1998
http://museodelacalle.tripod.com

The Museo de la Calle is made up of a collection of miscellaneous objects picked up in the streets by exchanges made with passers-by. Based on a project aimed at exchanging goods, the group began to “tread the streets” on top of Speedy, a go kart –or wooden box on wheels – inviting people to make an unlimited transaction with the proposal; shall we swap?
The changing collections of objects in this paradoxical museum bears witness to the diversity of everyday life in the streets and human and social relationships we establish through objects and material culture.
Navigating through urban areas, the Museo de la Calle stops at any corner to exhibit its collection and exchange its contents with the public. Exhibiting in the street is to recognize a public, some of whom are illiterate, and surprised by an exhibition that looks more like a travelling market stall, a joke or leg pulling or a sweet stall. They come face to face with a museum when they had not planned to visit any.

With the specific aim of making art by exchanging goods with other people, we set out in search of intimate moments in public spaces and “poetical events” which gave meaning to human and social relationships in everyday urban life.

Since 1998 the museum has travelled the streets of Bogota, Ljubljana, Seville, Barcelona, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Paris, Berne, Alcorcón, Istanbul, and Coslada.