“Topographies of Urban Discrepancy” opens up a space to approach the depths of the edges of the city, those spatial and social fabrics that fall outside the place of political representation, in other words, outside of the polis; following the tracks of certain ways of life that transit and configure them, without overlooking the complexity inherent to them. In the words of Fernand Deligny, “threading the lines of a human way of being banished from history but persistent”. And, for this, weaving and getting carried away by the weft of certain urban dissidences, thus configuring a topography that is necessarily transient, necessarily immanent. Sketching a cartography of what does not take form, a cartography of the impossible. This project will articulate a continuous research task with an open programme in collaboration with local networks and external agents, and will be developed through three lines of action (or errancy): a first called Third Landscape, from landscape architecture; a second called Praise of Conflict, which will be based on work in collaboration with various collectives and artists working in the peripheries of Barcelona; and a third. The Fragile City, which will open up an itinerant space for research.

SESSION 1
The Landscape of Discrepancy
Wednesday 23 November, 7 pm. Espai 4
7 p.m. Presentation of the project Topographies of Urban Discrepancy, with María García
7.30 p.m. Conference on “The Third Landscape”, with Gilles Clément

Manifieste du tiers paysage (Manifesto of the Third Landscape) is a book by landscape gardener Gilles Clément, which refers to the Third Estate of the 1789 pamphlet written by Sieyès. “It is a space that represents neither the power nor submission to the power.” Clément tackles a type of indecisive space, one that remains devoid of function and to which it is difficult to give a name; barren spaces, situated on the margins. Fragments of landscape that have no similarity of form, they have only one thing in common: they constitute a refuge for diversity. We can map some of these spaces by following certain populations that settle in them, forms of life not fully included in the hegemonic codes of modernity. They are, ultimately, spaces where the other has a place to be.

María García
Architect, visual artist and independent researcher. Research intern at the MNCARS (2015-16) and resident mediator at the Sala d’Art Jove (Youth Art Hall, 2015). Her projects are experimentation processes revolving around the production of territory through the structuring of hybrid narratives between the image, writing and action.

Gilles Clément
Landscape designer and professor at the National Higher School of Landscaping of Versailles. In addition to his activity as creator of parks, gardens and public and private spaces, he has developed a series of theoretical and practical works based on three cores of research: the Garden in Motion, the Planetary Garden and the Third Landscape.

Free entry. Limited places

 

SESSION 2
The Fragile City: the space of exclusion as the stronghold of the public
Thursday 24 November, 7 pm. Espai 4

7 p.m. Introduction by Andrea Soto Calderón
7.30 p.m. Lecture-debate, with Wim Cuyvers

Debate in French and Spanish (with simultaneous translation)

The Fragile City (La Città Fragile) is the title of a book by Beppe Rosso and Filippo Taricco. Both are playwrights who, concerned with the scenographic vocation gradually acquired by the city, where drama breaking out into the public space is interpreted as a weakness and a security problem, wanted to trace and make a stage version of the submerged parts of the metropolis.
We open up a line of thought regarding this fragile city in conversation with architect Wim Cuyvers, who will share his reflections on the field experiments he has carried out over the last ten years in various cities around the world. His main theory is that the weakest people (drug addicts, homeless people, nomadic travellers, etc.) give us the guidelines of the true public space, far away from commercial privatisations. Paradoxically, the public space then turns out to be the space of exclusion.

Andrea Soto
Doctor in Philosophy from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her lines of research focus on transformations of the aesthetic experience in contemporary culture, artistic research, the study of image and media, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics.

Wim Cuyvers
Architect and writer. He has worked as a teacher and researcher at different schools of architecture, especially in the Netherlands. His main focus of attention is the public space. He has published his research in the books Tekst over tekst and Brakin. He currently resides and works at the refuge at Montavoix (France).

Free entry. Limited places

 

SESSION 3
Praise of the Space in Conflict
Saturday 3 December, 7 pm. Espai 4
7 p.m. Presentation of the CICdB project – Centre for Interpretation of the City from the Hut, with LaFundició
7.30 p.m. Conference-debate on In Praise of Conflict, with Miguel Benasayag

Miguel Benasayag and Angélique del Rey, in their book Eloge de conflit, develop the idea that conflict is something inherent to our condition of being in the world, a multiplicity without synthesis that makes up the basis of the social fabric, and that Modernity – with its correlative democracy – has been especially implacable with conflict, creating the idea that it was something that could be overcome.
We can trace this genealogy of conflict in the peripheries of our cities. The paradigm was an inhabiting machine: the vital functions are studied, classified, and finally programmed in accordance with specific spaces. But the experiment fails, effectively, shortly after its construction, and the malaise of the marginal populations becomes physical once more.

LaFundició
Artists’ cooperative whose work is situated at the crossroads of artistic and cultural practices and education, understood as controversial activities. Currently their principal line of action is based around collaborative processes of continuity with different collectives, actions groups and institutions.

Miguel Benasayag
Franco-Argentine writer, philosopher and psychoanalyst. He is a participant in various advocacy movements such as NoVox, Laboratoires Sociaux and Act Up, and he coordinates the Malgré Tout (‘In Spite of Everything’) collective. He is the author of an extensive bibliography prominently featuring La Fragilité and Eloge de conflit (with Angélique del Rey).

Free entry. Limited places