PRESENTATION

PRESENTATION

¿What does a city propose? What are its mysteries, its hiding places, its underground paradises? And what are its devices for finding pleasure??  Carlos Monsivais

This seminar attempts to activate a forum for reflection on the informal strategies of appropriation of public places that arise in the face of an absence of any real urban planning that solves a city's problems. We shall start out with two Latin American cities, Bogota, Colombia and Mexico, D.F., Mexico from the point of view of artists, writers, musicians, architects, historians, etc.

Urbanism, as a social regulation project, applied to circumstances and specific ways of perceiving, has informal growing processes, whether spontaneous or pirate, as its opposite pole, the effect of which is also undesired by authorities. On many occasions this way of "making a city" becomes the only possible response for the community faced with political, social and economic conditions that limit the existence of true urban projects, allowing appropriation of public property through architecture, music or trade, to cite only a few options.

Within the framework of this project, creation of a zone in Seville is proposed for activation and speculation that allows the public to find out community strategies and hybrid, spontaneous ways to participate in redesigning a new city.

This Activation Zone, CHABOLA*, designed by Pablo León de la Barra, will be a catalyst for information and will have a library and a comfortable place that is also a reading room and forum for discussion and meetings for seminar guests and the public.

The first idea of Pablo León de la Barra consisted of designing a zone based on the how space is occupied and built up in the irregular settlements of Mexico City; the space was to be built with low-cost materials. But, on his trip to Seville to see the space (February 2003), he came across a series of articles in the newspaper about a shantytown under the Patrocinio Bridge occupied by Romanian refugees being torn down. He decided to visit this settlement, where he was attracted to several things that the author explains as follows: "one, the aesthetics of the buildings were rather similar to Mexico, where I was proposing my designed space for; two, that the experience in the so-called 'third world', has demonstrated that there are many other options to work with irregular settlements other than eviction and destruction; and three, that I was being invited to Seville to talk about informal situations in 'another place', when a similar situation existed right here."

The program of this seminar, which will take place every afternoon of the week, will be made up of two parts: on one hand, lectures by guests in the classroom in the Rector's Building at the University and on the other hand, "informal" presentations in the Chabola Activation Zone.

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* Chábola: Shack, shanty

PROGRAMME

PROGRAMME

Monday, May 19, 2003
· 17:30 - 19:30 h
Armando Silva
Bogota imagined: From the city of architecture to the city life of its cultures
He attempts to show the new paradigm of city life in the construction of the city, both as a collective awareness of the population and as what the city dwellers take as their own without knowing it, from the arts, films, TV scripts, that show Bogotá as their culture. Armando Silva will base his talk on the Book Bogotá imaginada (Taurus, April 2002), the first of a collection on imagined cities in Latin America and Spain.

· 20:00 - 22:00 h
Armando Silva
Clips from Latin America
Video clips and audiovisual material on Latin America, especially Mexico and Bogota. Sound, music and original noise from these cities.

Tuesday, May 20, 2003
· 17:30 - 18:30 h
Pablo León de la Barra
The Aesthetics of Resistance
Presentation of his recent work, where he will show the need to make informal urban practices visible, as well as the relationship existing between aesthetics and politics in the field of contemporary art.

· 18:30- 19:30 h
Pablo lazo
Assembled in Mexico
Visual recognition of the different ways and manners of appropriation for markets in Mexico City or in any other city in Latin America. By empirical elevation and urbanistic intervention, such recognition, as a whole, becomes a way of guiding visitors around the city. Furthermore, it is a visual exploration of the scenographic composition of these appropriated public spaces, whether temporary or permanent, which set "patterns" for an interdisciplinary test in understanding the phenomenon of urban appropriation as a basic urban structure in Mexico City.

· 20:00 - 22:00 h
Pablo León de la Barra y Pablo Lazo
Informal housing / Informal trade
Sample of audiovisual work on the city of Mexico presenting the occupation of space by informal strategies, for housing and sales, showing them as paradigms of other ways of making a city.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003
· 17:30 - 19:30 h
José Manuel Jaramillo
Figuration and disfiguration of water within city limits
The use of water represents a central factor in a society's urbanisation process. It implies limitations on the dominant notions of order, cleanliness, hygiene and organisation that operate in the space, and the behaviour, social practices and values that we build on them. In cities like Bogota, where spontaneous urban growth represents almost half of the total housing built during the second half of the twentieth century, water, like underground service networks, reflects a way of appropriating and integrating the social space, that reveals the conflict between the formal or established city and the marginal city.

· 20:00 - 22:00 h
José Manuel Jaramillo
Perceptions and oral testimonies on water in Bogota
Through the presentation of testimonies and images, exemplify and show the processes of genesis and conformation of peripheral neighbourhoods in Bogotá, in different stages of its history and according to the versions of its direct actors. At the same time, a discussion is sought on the conformation and development of knowledge of social manifestations arising and consolidating in the city outside of its cultural and institutionalised limits and in other social spheres.

Thursday, May 22, 2003
· 17:30 - 19:30 h
Luz Mary Giraldo
The written city: margins and centres
Analyse the many representations of the city, in the specific case of Bogota, in contemporary Colombian literature. That of the person passing through, the evocation, the crisis of common sense, the margins of society and violence, the immigrants and displaced persons. Each one of them has its centre and its margins of operation, in keeping with the viewpoint of the author and the experience he wishes to reveal to us.

· 20:00 - 22:00 h
Luz Mary Giraldo
What do the storytellers tell?
Commentated reading of brief texts alluding to the city and persons passing through it.

Friday, May 23, 2003
· 17:30 - 19:30 h
José Manuel Castillo Oléa
Mexico City: Informal urbanism
This lecture will present a recent alter-history of the City of Mexico in the light of the informal, presenting the thesis that perhaps it is more important to incorporate some of the practices of the informality in architectural, urbanistic and artistic disciplines than to make them disappear through their incorporation into legal or formal regimes.

· 20:00 - 21:00 h
José Manuel Castillo Oléa
Tactics/strategies of the informal in the urban periphery
Explore how some of the hierarchies (formal, order, infrastructure) that we traditionally assume are basic to our definition of the city, are subverted by informal practices in the urban periphery, where the imminent and short-term are constantly negotiated for the important and longer-term.

· 21:00 - 22:00 h
María Inés Rodríguez
Seville: parallel strategies of appropriation of public space
Presentation of audiovisual material, special guests...

* All the lectures and presentations will be open to the interested public.

PARALLEL ACTIVITIES

PARALLEL ACTIVITIES

Daily Bags
This is an artistic action of supermarket merchandise packing in different cities. During the action, Daily Services offers the customers their purchases in special plastic bags at the cash registers. The bags have recent photographs of public daily life in another city printed on them. When they take their purchases home, the supermarket customers make possible an exchange of pictures, transporting to their city the pictures of other cities. Daily bags is a Daily Services project (Angélica Chio & María Linares).

Daily bags will be celebrated in the superSol supermarkets: Centro Comercial Nervión Plaza (Avda Luis de Morales s/n) and C/ José Laguillo, 12.
Date: Tuesday 20th May and Thursday 22nd May, 12:00 to 13:00 h

Instan City
Instant City is a newspaper collecting different points of view and contributions on informal urbanism, in which urbanists, artists, designers, curators and musicians linked from near or from far to this project participate. María Inés Rodríguez was the general director; the artistic directors were Susana Shannon and Angelo Cirimele. Instant City has been edited in collaboration with the Instituto de México in Paris.

GUESTS

GUESTS

Armando Silva
Professor of Aesthetics and Visual Thought at the National University of Colombia, he studied Philosophy and Aesthetics at Rome University, Semiotics and Psychoanalysis at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and he specialised in Education and Linguistics at the Complutense University in Madrid. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of California, where he also did postdoctoral studies in Critical Theory. He is the director of the project Urban Culture in Latin America starting out with social imagery, which collects the perceptions of the people who live their lives daily in Latin American capitals. Urban networks approached in a broad study that attempts to respond to the contemporary question: What does being urban mean at the beginning of the third millennium in the large cities on our continent? He is also a columnist for the Bogota newspaper El Tiempo and contributor to several magazines, such as D'Ars of Milán, Arte y Cultura of Sao Paulo and Journal for Psychoanalysis and Art in California.

Pablo León de la Barra
Studied Photography at the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Architecture at the Iberoamerican University in that city and obtained a doctorate in History and Theory of Architecture in London. He works on the intersection between art and architecture. His work questions the appropriation, translation and migration of the images of modernity in different contexts, such as public and private, interior and exterior manifestations of these variations. He has participated in numerous collective and solo shows throughout the Americas and Europe.

Pablo Lazo
Architect and urban designer, has a degree in Architecture from the Iberoamerican University of Mexico, obtaining a Master in Design from the Architectural Association of London. At present, he works in the Arup architecture and urbanism office in London, where he mainly deals with urban regeneration and sustainable development. He has published articles in several newspapers and magazines in both Mexico and Spain as well as in the United Kingdom. Among his teaching activities, he has been professor attending urban workshops at the Architectural Association of the University of Pennsylvania and has been a DRL (Design Research Laboratory) invited critic. He is currently preparing a research project on the different tendencies of urban movements in the border area around Tijuana and a brief study on the appropriation of public spaces for markets in Mexico City. With the experimental architecture group, op_land, he won the international tender for the new library in Seinajoki, Finland (1999).

José Manuel Jaramillo
He studied history and sociology at the National University of Colombia and is presently instructor of Urban Sociology at the College of Human Sciences, where he is participating in the project Habitational Improvement of Popular Housing in Bogotá. He belongs to group Entre Casa, top electronic music label in Colombia. He has participated in numerous research projects such as: La Memoria del Agua, Fundación Humedales, Empresa de Acueducto y Alcantarillado de Bogotá, 2002; Testimonios de líderes barriales y veredales, Programa Bogotá Historia Común, Alcaldía Mayor de Bogotá, 1998. Among his publications are: Marginalidad urbana y uso del agua en Bogotá, 2002; La casa no vista, 2001; ¿Puede ser liberadora la sociología? Acercamientos a Pierre Bourdieu, 1999.

Luz Mary Giraldo
Literary historian, literary critic and university professor, she holds a Ph.D. in Liberal Arts. With studies in music and specialised in contemporary Latin American literature, she has devoted recent years to research in Colombian narrative and poetry. She is a Professor with tenure at Javeriana University, where she directed postgraduate work in Latin American Literature and is Associate Professor at the National University of Colombia, where she is currently Director of the Literary Studies degree. She was cultural advisor to the National Library of Colombia. In 1998 she obtained a National Grant for Literature from the Ministry of Culture and in 2000 Honorable Mention in the international competition on Latin American Thought Essay. Author of numerous articles in national and international magazines on Latin American narrative, she has published several books of poetry, anthologies of short stories, textbooks for children and essays.

José Manuel Castillo Oleá
Has a degree in Architecture from the Iberoamerican University of Mexico and obtained a PhD in Urbanism from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University with a dissertation on Informal urbanism: Spatial transformation in the periphery of Mexico City. His work and writing has been published in many magazines, such as Arquitectura, Praxis, Arquine, Enlace, Onomatopeya Urbana, Matador, Laberinto Urbano and the newspaper, Reforma. He has held a Conacyt fellowship at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, as well as the program for Young Creators of the Foundation for Urban Development (1995). At the moment he is a member of Futura Desarrollo Urbano, group focused on planning projects, urban design and architecture, developing proposals and strategies for different points in the metropolitan area among which the project México Ciudad Futura, is outstanding, a vision of infrastructure, ecology and urban development for the Lake Texcoco and Valley of Mexico area. He is also professor at the ITESM, Mexico City Campus.

DIRECTION
María Inés Rodríguez
Independent Curator, lives and works in Paris. She is a habitual contributor to the magazines, Atlántica, Valdez and Centrodearte.com. Among her latest projects we can highlight: Instant City, Instituto de Mexico, in Paris, 2003; De la représentation à l'action, Exteresa Arte Actual (Mexico), Planetario Distrital (Bogota), Le Plateau /mains d'Oeuvres (Paris), 2002; Yes, en cualquier lugar puede suceder, 8 signos - 8 días, M&M projects, San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2002; Cutting edge Caribe, in collaboration with Antonio Zaya and Víctor Zamudio Taylor, Arco 02, Madrid, 2002.