POST - IT City - architeria.eu

ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION
Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona
Barcelona, Spain

POST - IT City. Occasional Urbanities
13 March - 25 May 2008

The Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) and the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica (CASM)
present the exhibition POST-IT City. Occasional Urbanities, curated by Giovanni La Varra, Martí Peran,
Filippo Poli and Federico Zanfi. The exhibition forms part of the POST-IT project, directed by Martí Peran,
which began in 2005 with a series of seminars and workshops at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona.

The research project focuses on the temporary uses of public space for commercial, recreational
and sexual activities in cities around the world.
This type of urban practice appears, moves and disappears, like a post-it stuck on a place that is important
in passing but leaves almost no trace. This phenomenon highlights the different needs and shortcomings that
affect certain groups in particular, and serves to salvage the value of public space.
Research into these types of occasional occupation of the city is based on two different viewpoints:
emergencies that are forced to parasitize public space, and the capacity of citizens to optimize space,
beyond its intended functions.

With this dual perspective as its basis, the exhibition presents the cases of 78 cities as varied as Tel Aviv,
Buenos Aires, Hanoi, Santiago de Chile, Bologna and Barcelona. POST-IT City seeks to explore
the phenomenon of occasional urbanities in their many possible variants, with a view to documenting
and reflecting on them: an industrial estate that becomes a car racing track at weekends, the use of the
city “under construction” for the adventures of explorer nerds, certain aspects of the squatter phenomenon,
the use of waste land for occasional meetings (a traveller’s camp or a rave), the conversion of the daytime
university city into an area for sexual transactions by night, etc.

This is a project which, with the wealth of parameters involved, presents us with a series of issues of
particular interest for contemporary culture: the need to create available space, the versatility of the recycling
concept, the emergence of new subjectivities, etc.

The set of materials that go to form this Post-it City. Occasional urbanities project derive from different
sources as well as from different work processes. Posited as an archive about different case studies,
the majority of them have been produced especially for the project. In order to carry out the research,
we proceeded to involve various agents in different cities throughout the world, the idea being that
they would plan their contributions according to their closeness to and direct knowledge of the location.

Up until now some twenty different cities have participated in the project. The interlocutors in each of
them have their own profile (organised collectives, university nuclei, art centres, individual researchers,
etcetera) and as a result their characteristic ways of approaching the phenomenon, too. There is not,
then, the one register in the methodology that lies behind the archive as a whole.

The project per se contains research on very disparate contexts that are impossible to assimilate given the
specific characteristic of each city from a social, economic or political perspective. The project doesn’t set out
to promote a homogeneous reading of the mechanisms of appropriation of public space on a planetary scale
but on the contrary, to suggest an approximation to certain post-it cases, so as to accentuate the peculiarities
of each context and to start a common dialogue between different perspectives.

The greater part of the work teams consist of young researchers. This characteristic is fundamental
in the mindset of the project inasmuch as it gives explicit backing to the absolute intersection between
the processes of the formation, production and circulation of ideas.

-----------
CREDITS:
Text and images: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona