City Interpretation Center from the Barraca (Shack)

9.11.15

Map of urban areas of Barcelona and its metropolitan area that includes the ‘Anarchic Zones. Barracas’. Exp. 562 13/72. Arxiu Municipal de L’Hospitalet.

CICdB is a series of collective creation and research processes aimed at building knowledge and instituting practices around the urban environment; an initiative that wants to adopt strategies, ways of doing, and perspectives typical of the informal city, of the barraca. The work processes of the CICdB can be divided into three closely related lines that involve recovering the memory of the informal city and activating it in the present: a Dialogical Archive, a series of Activations in the territory, and a Nomadic Headquarters.

• Dialogical Archive: Dialogical and performative device that expresses the tension between the formal/institutional character of the archive itself and the informal/instituting nature of the barraca. What
  logics and ways of archiving would correspond to subaltern spaces and practices?
  
• Activations in the territory: Community processes of creation and intervention in the territory based on the collective construction of knowledge from the barraca.
• Nomadic Headquarters: Architectural laboratory that, in successive iterations, responds through the creation of informal architectures to the characteristics of the territory in which it is located and to the practices that it hosts or that develop in its environment (among them those of the Dialogical Archive itself and its different Activations).

Some generating questions of these processes would be: Can we recover subaltern stories and knowledge and build new ones by placing ourselves on the margins of the city? From the barraca, can we organize new epistemological devices not subject to hegemonic models of production of social space?

LaFundició initiates this project in mid-2015, as a result of various previous actions and processes linked to the informal city and its memory, as well as to reflection on the very idea of institutionality. These experiences have served usto observe the isomorphism between the institutions and the devices that compose them, that is, between the institutions andthenetwork of relationships between discourses, ways of doing, measures, utensils, and installations that give them shape. Both the CICdB and other of our projects propose the collective organization of instituting practices that develop, expose, and promote debate around the controversies about their own origin and construction.

LaFundició initially promotes this project, but we hope that its future development will extend to a broad and variable network of collaborations with diverse people, groups, and organizations, among which we can already count neighbors of Bellvitge and el Gornal (former neighbors of the neighborhoods of La Bomba, Can Pi and La Cadena in L’Hospitalet), the archivists
Jorge Blasco
and Marià Hispano, the Centre d’Estudis de L’Hospitalet, the Fundació Antoni Tàpies or
La Virreina Centre de la Imatge
.

The City Interpretation Center from the Barraca was selected in 2015 as a finalist project of the

I International Award for Cultural Innovation

of the
CCCB
.