A metropolitan cultural convoy
PUT IT ON WHEELS
Vertical workshop at International University of Catalunya UIC codirected together with Raquel Colacios
/ 2020
While today cultural institutions deal with restrictions, homework, and economic constrains, a new pop-up culture raised transversally, spread among organic form of cultural and political integrations. Within virtual rooms and online platforms, together, teachers and more than 120 students revisit theories of the street and envisioning forms of urbanities and collectives thinking. A vertical workshop that aspired to receive mobile platforms to be intervened and deployed as urban scenarios evolved into a collective and co-creative online pedagogical methodology, by experience education support and resources for today’s challenges.
Aiming for sustainable design perspectives for creative industries, “Put It On Wheels” was a collective exercise of knowledge and technological democratization that opens up for new practices across disciplines and culture for tomorrows sustainable societies.
Starting from the idea of the city as a reprogrammable ground, individually as same as collectively, “Put It On Wheels” explored, physically and digitally, networks of correlations and cooperation between citizenship and portable technological apparatus, transforming the street in an operative surface, able to support grassroot movements and organizations. The project worked on a metropolitan scale, performing open theaters and urban oasis within the morphology of the city, portraiting and framing complex itineraries of cultural ecosystems. “Put it on wheels” is an open-source matrix of artistic and environmental deployable devices that was co-developed and evolved by instantaneous events as same as scheduled agendas. By responding to environmental and social demands, the performative, portable hubs brings back the notions of montages, emerging deployable infrastructure and providing intelligent platforms as vibrant urban choreographies. The systems take place as everyday scenarios, but also festivals and a wide set of effervescing, urban experiences. The workshop pushes forward the idea of supportive movable structures that grows and degrows, adapted or moved, moved or reestablished, rearranged and reconnected, triggering organic manifestations of culture and fresh emancipatory urban life.
The urban strategy is based on social and environmental portable infrastructures, assembling and disassembling by a catalog of deployable everyday programmatic devices and integrated components such as gardens, stages, playgrounds, open classrooms, as well as urban farming and energy sustainable systems. The deinstitutionalized manifestations of culture then take place in emerging networks and supportive infrastructure: flexible and mutable, but most specially, customable. These forms of integration enhance a set of negotiations and provide models of iterations over public spaces. The new occupations improves abstract thinking and subjectivity, recreating the standard life and claiming for democratic spaces and knowledge exchange. The decentralized cultural fleet and the radical convoy unfolds new protocols of participation, understanding the street as a reprogrammable ground, activated by forces of the collective. an open canvas for social innovation, linking initiatives, eager to rethink the public realm and expand the public domain. The new forms of institutions will raise from networks of cooperation and mutate, navigating on the wheels of the changeable post-industrial society.
A Project exercise based on co-creation processes. An urban multi-handed festival, a cooperative transition experiment. A pedagogical space with open-source tools that allows us to reflect and rethink the methods and possible spaces for current education, located in the issues that truly affect and summon us: ecological challenges, inclusive societies, and access to culture and democracy.