TODO POR LA PRAXIS. (TxP) is presented as a ‘laboratory' where to test artistic-activist practice projects aimed at the aesthetic-effective amplification of social struggle cycles. TxP is generated from the inevitable convergence between artistic-activist practices, architectural praxis as an interconnection process between public space and multitude, and the ethnography of social communication aimed at creating opposition spaces of immaterial interchange. It is an epistemological materialisation of the socio-cultural capital which the different opposition social networks to hegemony have woven in the last quarter of the 20th century in post-industrial metropolises; a theoretical-methodological laboratory whose ultimate function is to investigate the ontological resistance processes of antagonistic subjectivities.
TxP presents two axes of investigation to Madrid Abierto: Speculator- EmptyWorld.
Using the ‘imagery' of comics, they have generated a type-Marvell ‘superhero' (or ‘supervillain') who personifies the semi-conscious idea of the ‘mass worker', of the existence of an artefact-subject, the positive/negative hero who embodies the ideology of the today's speculator. Through a series of vignettes spread across the exhibition space and a visual projection in different points, they attempt to ‘publish' our social capitalism superhero. The caption of the Speculator "Welcome to the desert of reality!" becomes the ‘reading key' that enables us to ‘drift' through Madrid, as a symbolic recreation of the immaterial power of property speculation.
The housing problem experienced by large sectors of society is aggravated by an oversized property market that ignores the current wealth of property in a state of abandonment or part of the speculation process. The reason behind this phenomenon is the speculative profit generated by changes in the value of the floor from the time the property is abandoned to the subsequent appreciation of the neighbourhood. The aim of Empty World is to analyse these processes.
The residents of the neighbourhood are invited to participate in a signposting campaign by placing stickers with the Empty World (EW) logotype on the empty property found in their buildings/blocks.
An Empty World Empty Property State Agency is set up in the Liquidación Total (Full Clearance Sale) space. In the shop window, the iconography of traditional state agencies is reproduced and empty apartments are offered to potential tenants through a visual ‘catalogue' (a register of unoccupied apartments) of the empty apartments available in the neighbourhood.
Organisation of workshops based on the ‘gentrification' and property speculation phenomena (see Empty World Workshops on www.emptyworld.es).
Liquidación Total.
C/San Vicente Ferrer Nº 23. Local 2
Metro Tribunal. Madrid
1. We are not what you think we should be or what we really are. We are a liquid resistance that permanently constitutes itself in relation to fluid, referential and self-managing contexts. We are a laboratory of projects that practices structural ethnography on opposition artistic activist practices as formalisations potentially capable of symbolising the social conflict in an aesthetically effective execution in the public space. We are the echo of the poverty of Philosophy, of its derivations on the social context marked by the withdrawal of the paradigm-models and post-post-modern tales. You don't know it, but we are all a methodological axis, an epistemological variant among various others. First step to bringing capitalism down from your home: Break the silence, become visible as antagonistic subjectivity; become an anti-capitalism virus and spread.
2. We are always the otherness. You will never recognise us. We are agit-pop elements, a political-pop reformulation stemming from the death rattles of the marginal, post-industrial public space of agitprop, a link, an extra-historical link, designed as a total and multi-polar resistance against the hegemony of post-material capitalism. We are an axis around which three investigation axes are articulated (the post-urban, the infra-urban and the supra-urban) which represent proletarian subjectivity in its axiomatic pre-power state, a potential transformation of a seemingly immutable reality. Second step to bringing capitalism down from your home: Make an effort, a small effort, and remember what you were, what you thought you were, and what you wanted to be before assuming what you are; insurrection begins with desire.
3. We are a consequence, the dark side imposed by the blind forces of capital, functioning in automatic pilot, operating impersonally without passion or emotion, with their seductive logic of sensitive social control over uncoordinated subjects in their multiple manageable desires. As such, we act as a projection of the de-concealment desire of a mute mass. Based on the class interest logic, the post-urban conceals more sensitive than reasonable issues, the infra-urban conceals more romantic than effective ideas and the supra-urban disguises a calmness so simulated, a well-being so weak and questionable that, because it is so convincing, it has engendered a suburban revolt which, as well as questioning the institutional methods, it delegitimises its spectacular idea. From there stems the social need for a de-concealment of the discourses and practices that address the structuring of the urban, focusing on the symbolic production systems, circulation of meaning and social meaning processes. All the practices aimed at inventing resistance spaces against the control mechanisms-devices are potential artistic projects. Third step to bringing capitalism down from your home: You are an activist artist; act like one and generate your own activist-artistic self-defence collective.
4. We are secular alchemists opposed to capitalism, that fictitious psycho-technical management space, the minimalist exhibitionism of those of us who can only trans-socialise outside the public-political space through the aesthetized potlach of the interchange of intense disappointment. It is a question of broadening artistic practices as means of social expression, as collective authors of our own experience, experiencing the construction of position spaces, as decisive authors rather than passive spectators. Fourth step to bringing capitalism down from your home: Become a non-negotiable antagonism; defend yourself against capitalism.
5. We are a process; our state is a derivative procedural text, a bad experience of identities disconnected from a virtually possible reality, a reality imagined as potential subjectivity, frozen in the project phase. We are explicit, evident, pre-political. We all need controlled authenticity rituals and we will provide authenticity according to our existential demotivation. We are a post-situationist social laboratory generator of immaterial situations capable of altering the nausea, the systemic repetition. We are the subjects of intermittent precariousness, the objectors from the slums who gained access to their academies, the first to lead the urban withdrawal and the last to abandon the epistemological trench. We were the ones who shouted against the inevitable before sinking into a positional and declining silence. We refuse the means and the end and we now claim the streets as the operation centre of the new uprisings. We are a provocation. We burnt Paris in 2005 and we will do so again. We will be the first to join a revolution, a guerrilla in favour of self-managing the symbolic economy of the post-industrial proletariat. We were the ones who nobody ever saw in the right place at the right time. We are invisible! We have the fifth assumption in our hands. Fifth step to bringing capitalism down from your home: A new battle is about to begin; get ready for the global uprising.
Speculator. PPº de Recoletos, central boulevard, next to Plaza de Colón.
Empty World. Liquidación Total, C/ San Vicente Ferrer Nº 23. From 7th February to 3th March.
