Design, production, and management project for a light infrastructure to intervene in public spaces, in collaboration with students from CEIP El Martinet, IES Can Mas, and different groups from the Can Mas neighborhood in Ripollet. The implementation of the Open-roulotte will be preceded by a long research process through a mobile radio device also designed by these groups in collaboration with LaFundició+FAAQ.
http://open-roulotte.pbworks.com
INTRODUCTION::
As in previous projects, Open-roulotte stems from the desire to launch collective processes of reflection and intervention on what is called “the public space” from the educational institution (in this case, the school). Open-roulotte is a project in collaboration with catarQsis and initially involves the participation of CEIP El Martinet. The inclusion of Open-roulotte in the Community Cultural Action and Creation program, which is part of the Can Mas Integral Intervention Project (the Ripollet neighborhood where the El Martinet school is located), facilitates and allows the inclusion of other groups and individuals in this process of reflection and intervention on public spaces, starting with IES Can Mas and the AA.VV. of Can Mas, which others may join in the future.
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JUSTIFICATION::
We believe that spaces considered public are actually highly designed, managed, and regulated vertically and often from positions disconnected from the reality of citizens. A first purpose in this project would be, therefore, to know the administrative status of these places in order to cross them with the desires and needs of the people who inhabit them, promoting social exchange between these different spaces.
In this sense, Open-roulotte is articulated around several questions: What activities are carried out in public space? Who decides what activities can be proposed and whether they are relevant or not, and how? Through what devices is activity in urban space articulated? How could a new device model be built to generate self-managed urban activity?
Open-roulotte proposes to open a collaborative process of design and management of a light infrastructure, a mobile architectural device that can be implemented in public space and that can contain different devices and technologies at the service of a program of activities managed and designed collectively. We want to emphasize the fact of generating a feeling of appropriation of public space by citizens and not an exclusively use decided from urban design or sociocultural policies, closed and limited from the position of expert technicians. If we can say that citizens are often excluded from decision-making processes on these issues, it is no exaggeration to think that children of school age suffer a double exclusion. That is why we find interesting the possibility that, initially, the school becomes the driving group and the catalyst of this collaborative process within the scale of the neighborhood, a conviction that we share with CEIP El Martinet and IES Can Mas.
This process will be articulated around a previous qualitative research on the territory, Open-roulotte puts the emphasis on the public character of this research, and on the fact that it will be carried out in collaboration with the students themselves, together with other groups of Ripollet and not by external researchers.
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SOME METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND OBJECTIVES::
Open-roulotte wants to establish its own intervention in public space as a process of participatory research and vice versa, to make research a way of intervening in public space. To some degree, this intervention has to disrupt the daily dynamics of the territory, but we want this intrusion to be done organically and to really open a public debate.
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OPEN-ROULOTTE RADIO::
www.openroulotteradio.podomatic.com
Open-roulotte Radio is a radio station managed by the students of CEIP El Martinet, IES Can Mas and other groups that will be added during the development of the project. The programs prepared by these groups will be made public in podcast format and in a special edition dedicated to the Projecte d’Intervenció Integral Can Mas in collaboration with Ràdio Ripollet. We understand Open-roulotte Radio as a performative device with several aspects or objectives because it must function as a means to:
• Investigate and know the territory.
• Contact and dialogue with the people who inhabit this territory.
• Carry out a first intervention in three layers of public space: the physical layer (the neighborhood, the city…) the digital layer (the radio on the internet) and the analog layer (the radio in the radio spectrum).
The implementation of Open-roulotte Radio will constitute a continuous process of research, management, design and modification that consists of four lines of action.
• Exploration: We propose that the participants in the project act as explorers, as archaeologists on the territory. Outings have been organized to the spaces and places of the neighborhood that were considered relevant and during which materials, images, data and recordings have been collected. The subsequent analysis of all this material is capital in the rest of the lines of action and has been poured in part, in the form of cartographies made by the participating students themselves. Part of the photographic and audiovisual information (video interviews) extracted during these explorations is published in the Flickr and YouTube services or represented in the Google Maps service:
◦ YouTube: www.youtube.com/user/LaFundicio
◦ Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/lafundicio
◦ Google Maps:
Screen reader users: click here to access the simplified HTML version
©2011 Google –
Map data ©2011 Tele Atlas – Terms of Use
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• Design, construction and installation of the set/mobile radio unit: The previous knowledge of the territory will serve to adapt the radio device previously designed to the physical and social characteristics of each of the places in which it will be installed for the realization of the programs. This will be another way to intervene in public space. The radio set, as well as the programs, can constitute an effective relational tool that allows dialogue with and between individuals, groups and entities of the neighborhood.
• Writing and realization of the radio programs: The students of the school and the institute, and the rest of the participating people and groups will form the writing council of the radio, which will carry out its task based on the research carried out during the explorations. This work contemplates the writing and the realization of the interviews and the rest of the sound material that is emitted (wedges, musical selection…). The programs will be carried out in the previously explored locations and will be open to the live participation of the public. The radio, in its digital version on the internet, constitutes in itself a sound archive.
• Analysis of the information obtained: The analysis will be carried out on the data obtained from the explorations and the radio programs (interviews, recordings, etc.). This analysis will form the conceptual basis of the next phase of the project.
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THE OPEN-ROULOTTE::
As we have said before, from all the previous research work carried out through the radio, we propose to launch in the neighborhood a collective process of design of a light infrastructure that could be implemented in public space and with a program of activities also managed and designed collectively, that responds to the needs and desires that have arisen.
An open architectural design workshop will be enabled to which all the agents of the neighborhood who wish to do so can attend and participate (and who will have been contacted previously through the radio station).
We propose that the Open-roulotte not only be an infrastructure of events, but also a management model that materializes in a specific legal form that fits the collaborative nature of the entire project. As well as a record of its different uses that functions as an alternative means for collective memory.
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THE AGENTS AND THE TERRITORY::
The collaboration between LaFundició and catarQsis began with projecte3*, and since then the shared interest in pushing the respective disciplines towards a collaborative dimension contextualized in the territory and social relations, reviewing the traditional function of art pedagogy on the one hand and architecture on the other, has led to this new project.
CEIP El Martinet is a school that promotes the autonomy of children while promoting collaboration and learning through social relations, not only among the students themselves, but between the school and its context. The students develop personal research projects and are organized by learning communities. This translates into a disposition of the spaces different from the usual in schools: all the spaces are communicated with each other and are organized in thematic work areas. Likewise, the center has been developing on its own, since its creation six years ago, and in collaboration with other agents, artistic intervention projects in the neighborhood.
IES Can Mas is a center in operation since the 1998-99 academic year, in these ten years it has been growing little by little, both in students and in teaching staff, facilities and experience. The institute is located on the edge of the Can Mas neighborhood, and although it is not within the limits of action of the Can Mas Integral Intervention Project, the will of the teaching team to participate in the cultural initiatives that occur in the territory has prompted them to be part of the Open-roulotte project.
The neighborhood of Can Mas (Ripollet) is, without a doubt, one more agent, and of great importance, within the general approach of the project that wants to open to the active participation of its inhabitants. The current situation of the neighborhood is marked by the profound changes that will involve the Environment Plan promoted by the city council of the town.
Ràdio Ripollet is the local station. Its managers understand that their collaboration in this project responds exactly to the public function of the medium.
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CREDITS. OPEN-ROULOTTE IS::
An initiative of:
In charge of:
Participate:
CEIP El Martinet
AAVV Can Mas
Organizes:
Sponsored by:
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Collaborates:
With the support of: