Shared Fictions. The cultural lab that imagines common futures
Through Shared Fictions, the old Tobacco Factory of Alicante became a meeting place for neighbours, ecologies and cultural policies. A summer programme embedded in its immediate territory, transcending the physical limits of the cultural centre but also of what we understand as a city. This programme combined habitat with encounter; learning with enjoyment and hedonism with commitment in order to achieve an intergenerational, interspecies and expanded activation throughout the Alicante region.
Local
Spain
Alicante
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-10-30
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): La cuarta piel Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: César Last name of representative: Fuertes Gender: Male Nationality: Spain Function: designer Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Avenida Costa Blanca 22 Town: Alicante Postal code: 03012 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34 679 45 97 71 E-mail:info@lacuartapiel.com
Ficciones Compartidas is an initiative located in the drying room of the old tobacco factory in Alicante (currently part of the C.C. Las Cigarreras) that generates a meeting place between neighbourhoods, ecologies and cultural policies. It is a summer programme that integrates installations, workshops and talks, with the aim of establishing conversations but also exchanging doings, capable of building communities today and tomorrow around the old tobacco factory.
For two centuries, the Alicante Tobacco Factory was one of the main economic engines of the Alicante metropolitan area. After its dismantling in 2008, the third oldest tobacco factory in Spain began a process to convert its 30,000 m2 into a centre for contemporary culture. Ficciones Compartidas, which pivots on the Secadero and traces its routes in the direction of the neighbourhoods surrounding the factory and towards the vast territory that sustains it, aims to make the Secadero a small shared cultural laboratory, where children and adults, cultural agents, farmers, artisans and other professionals can meet and produce shared agendas for the future.
The second edition of Ficciones Compartidas: Alçar la terra approached the soil as a material for research and enjoyment. We turned the Secadero into a space for experimenting and learning together where we thought with our hands about the issues that affect the city and the planet.
We learned by doing about ecology, equality and sustainability. With the workshops, we built and researched the two festival installations Alfarería del engaño and Acumulaciones de un tiempo muy pasado. As in a laboratory, by tracing the reactions we felt part of the same curiosity. The concerts and the strange parties revived the bodies to the point of transforming the Drying Room. And with the excursions we went out into the landscapes on which the city depends. A combination to lift the earth together and see what is going on under our feet.
circularity
critical pedagogies
self-build
material experimentation
ecology
The use of material was a key point in the process of the project. We understand that each material carries with it a series of meanings and political positions. To build the Secadero installations this year we made use of waste from the production of nearby industries, waste from landfills, urban land and materials forgotten in the warehouses and storage rooms of the Carolinas neighbourhood, and we used simple tools to transform them with our own hands and give them new uses.
With Alçar la terra, we focus on the landscapes of discarded waste that make up a new archaeological stratum of our time, such as the landfills of Santa Pola and Foncalent, the waste from the old greenhouse, ceramics and footwear industries and the urban land and rubbish from the Carolines Baixes neighbourhood. For each of these landscapes we select a waste item (garments and textile fibres in the landfill; plastics, aggregates, rubber and sludge from surplus industries, human hair, electronic scrap and clays from the Carolines neighbourhood) and incorporate it into our facilities by altering its expected use.
Often, the recycling of these elements is not well planned and they end up abandoned in large piles without a clear destination, we believe that making them visible through spatial experiences helps to establish critical discourses about our industrial environment. After the end of the programming, we have created a material bank of La cuarta piel to reuse and redistribute the designed pieces.
Ficciones Compartidas: alçar la terra turned the homogeneous spaces of the institution into hedonistic places, which put the encounter of bodies at the centre. The transformation of the materials always aimed at enveloping experiences that expand the idea of beauty from the visual to the sensual and understand the festive encounter of bodies as an aesthetic act.
All the installations make the collective experience their main objective, using design as a means to encourage reflection and care. In the case of Alfarería del engaño, we built a collective trousseau from the urban clays of Alicante that was premiered and shared in a ceremony of mud and fire, where we made each other a ritual of care. In the case of accumulations of a present time, the compaction of a fictitious terrestrial crust, was done through a strange party that invited the participants to dance on top of the installation as if it were a dance floor.
All the workshops sought to bring participants closer to exceptional and extraordinary techniques, instruments and tools. Thus, to reflect on the transformation and disintegration of everyday objects, their trace and disappearance, different moulding, metal casting and modelling techniques were explored in order to give them meaning through fetishes and jewellery. Or to discover the infrastructures of the soil, expeditions were organised with metal detectors and metal detectorists, inviting participants to develop their curiosity and inventiveness.
Ficciones Compartidas orbited on the exchange of knowledge through doing - learning by doing. Its main objective was to promote ecological discourses about territories that affect the city and to do so through workshops with neighbours and the collective construction of installations.
On the one hand, the installations were aimed at highlighting the value of techniques inherent to trades, such as pottery in Alfareria del engaño or jewellery in Acumulaciones de un pasado muy presente . This learning was extended to all the neighbours who joined the workshops.
On the other hand, a specific workshop for young people between 15-20 years old at risk of social exclusion invited these neighbours of the Carolinas neighbourhood to discover the archaeology of the neighbourhood from a playful point of view, creating a safe space.
In addition, during the two festive days, workshops were held that expanded the ecologies of the facilities with a clear pedagogical mission: the permaculture workshop taught us to take advantage of the compost from the plants to build new sediments and pots, the make-up workshop invited us to create our own avatar through which we could recognise ourselves as queers, the upciclyng workshop invited us to learn DIY textile recycling techniques... In addition, a workshop was opened by call to allow the professionalisation of young people and the sharing of emerging works. The auditorium allowed the programming of concerts and film screenings, which ensured intergenerational encounters.
Ficciones Compartidas involved the development of installations based on traditional techniques and skills integrated in a novel and unexpected way in a new production context: the Las Cigarreras cultural centre. We inherited techniques from traditional crafts from Alicante (basketry, pottery, jewellery...) which we implemented in the installations, revising and hacking them. This was done through direct contact with those professionals who taught us their knowledge. Thus, by implementing the techniques of these trades in architecture, we obtain an interdisciplinary crossover that benefits, on the one hand, the design of the installations and ensures, on the other hand, the circulation of knowledge and the survival of those industries that are exposed to disappearance.
The workshops were completely free and open registration and it happened that a constant group of neighbours was generated, who coincided in the different laboratories, creating a community of young people (between 20 and 30 years old) and adults (from 60...).
Through the workshops, Ficciones Compartidas brings together associations and personalities, cultural agents and the curious involved in sustaining the life of the neighbourhoods surrounding the old Tabacalera. It rescues from their memory the main protagonists of this space: the cigarreras, the women who for two centuries consolidated a community of workers, championing care and labour rights.
Participants belong to the local and regional level, responding to a mix of professional and citizen profiles.
On the one hand, the driving force behind La cuarta piel is formed by an interdisciplinary group of architects, artists, ceramists and farmers who bring their concerns and learning into a common project. These crossovers are reflected in the design of the spaces, the production of the installations and the activation of the workshops and parties, which propose a unique amalgam of experiences and learning.
The aim of Ficciones Compartidas is to turn the Secadero into a meeting place that produces coexistence, between bodies and materials, that fosters a conversation about the environment that sustains life in Alicante. Both the methodology behind the material transformation of the drying shed and the summer programme demonstrate the mediation between ecology, participation, art and architecture.
Our approach to environmental conflicts (ecology) is based on aesthetic experiences open to a wide public (mediation) and on recycled materials linked to these same conflicts (design). By subverting the conventional use of land, waste, greenhouse plastics, we speculate through design with alternative futures and propose aesthetics that are attractive to citizens. Moreover, they are designed to be experienced: dancing on a crack of the future made from landfill fabrics, applying clays collectively or listening to a concert in a recycled greenhouse are experiences that through the experience and the collective moment make reflection an exercise in enjoyment.
In this way, a homogeneous institutional space becomes a potential transformative place. The historical resources of the region are recycled in beautiful ways and with the sole objective of being used and appropriated by the users of the cultural centre.
Shared Fictions takes the associative fabric that emerged in the Alicante Tobacco Factory in the 1950s as its departure point. There, a group of women workers known as ''las cigarreras'' created an exemplary union model that combined work with care and the conquest of rights. They were the guests who inaugurated the project on its first session, called Affects, and their ethos was a guideline when it came to approaching a vulnerable context such as the Carolinas Bajas neighbourhood.
From the very beginning, one of the main efforts was to achieve greater contact between the daily life of the cultural centre and that of its surrounding neighbourhoods. The demographic reality of Carolinas Bajas is a combination of an ageing population who witness with astonishment the evolution of their neighbourhood and a high percentage of immigrants at risk of social exclusion. With our programme we wanted to weave networks made up of independent neighbourhood agents, with the aim of sharing past and present experiences in the neighbourhood.
We believed that a useful way to recover a sense of belonging is to read the province of Alicante from the economic traditions to which its inhabitants have dedicated themselves for several generations, such as marble, fishing or market gardening.
These activities bring with them local knowledge that implies an expertise of the surrounding territory and which, in a cultural context that attracts disparate agents, has the potential to generate a positive transmission of knowledge.
Our project proposed recycling and encounter as a strategy to face the climate emergency. We believe that the playful and experiential involvement of people has the capacity to generate a sense of collective responsibility and a rapprochement to conflicts that are often too big and too distant.
Shared Fictions takes reference from other collective construction processes and seeks to incorporate novelties in the provenance of materials and design processes, exploring the agency of all parties challenged by the project situation.
The project democratises the ecological and social impact of territorial conflicts through hedonistic experiences and intergenerational co-learning encounters. It proposes experience as a vehicle for learning, ensuring the democratisation of knowledge, equalising different social or economic contexts through conscious celebration.
The proposal for the reactivation of the cultural centre aims to have a noticeable social impact and to be economically feasible. It tests fairer and more sustainable social architectures, both economically and ecologically. Not only do we contribute to restoring pride in Alicante's material culture, but we also speculate, with several hands, on its future, experimenting with future alternatives. It is about mixing the most contemporary debates with the most local cultures.
Ficciones Compartidas turned the homogeneous institutional space into a hedonistic, transformative place, putting the encounter of bodies at the centre. It gave rise to the constitution of the association La Cuarta piel, a community of practices that translates the processes that sustain human life in cities. It does so through hedonistic situations that materialise the ecological relations of these complex processes and bring them closer to a human scale. An intermediation exercise that facilitates communication between knowledge, species and territories.
The methodology of the project is based on three pillars: an approach to a problem through its agents, a material sensibility and open maker culture of experimentation and self-production, and a collective experience as an exercise of enjoyment and democratic reflection.
Our proposals arise from direct contact with the territory through involvement with the agents involved in it: industry, citizens, institutions. We understand the materials of each place as forensic evidence full of political charge and meaning. That is why through design we expand their possibilities, challenging the culture of the material beyond its functionality or aesthetics, to speculate on possible futures from a positive, affirmative and propositional point of view. In this way, we generate experiences. We seek to replace analysis with experience, and to know through the body, the experience and the moment. We can inhabit conflicts and contradictions through hedonism and enjoyment.
Ficciones Compartidas proposes a reflection on the role that cultural institutions play in their neighbourhood and environment. It aims to establish links with other communities and test other institutional constructions. The project allows the Centro Cultural de Las Cigarreras to be traversed by what is happening in its immediate context, "piercing the Museum" in order to influence the state of things.
The project understands that certain specific materials generate a certain sense of belonging for each place. The material culture that surrounds us is loaded with meanings, histories and conflicts. It is a vehicle for collective reflection. Thus, we promote the use of materials and traditional knowledge recycled from the immediate environment and their
implementation in open processes where the interaction between the different agents marks the evolution of the project itself.
The initiative is based on the association of different profiles (designers, artists, sociologists, cooks, architects, farmers...) in the design, production and activation phases. The design process also involves learning about democracy, which ensures the assembly and decision making of the members of the association. We have found learning by doing methodologies fundamental to ensure this coexistence.
The aforementioned methodology brought to the space of the cultural centre various conflicts existing in the territory of Alicante but also in many other territories around the world. By recovering abandoned materials from landfills, old factories, or food from the neighbourhood itself, as well as organising excursions to these landscapes and the environment of the huerta, we sought to connect citizens with their immediate context.
The debate on waste management appeared through the materials recovered from landfills on the verge of collapse. The fabrics used for the installation were a reflection of a textile industry that produces pollution on both a small and large scale.
In Alfareria del engaño we uncovered a parallel history between intimate and non-transferable clay objects (the bridal jar, the union jar...) and women's heteropatriarchal rituals (courtship, wedding, pregnancy, childbirth...) By making a feminist trousseau of our own, we were able to challenge the heteropatriarchal status quo.
In recent decades, conflicts over water management in the Southeast of Spain have made the huerta of Alicante an impoverished environment, favouring the intensive agricultural model. Ficciones Compartidas generated a space to talk about food sovereignty through La recolectora, who prepares menus based on gleaning the leftovers from Alicante's markets, and the guide with Daniel Climent, an ethnobotanist from Alicante, who taught us about the species we live with in our daily lives.
In short, Shared Fictions evaluated what involvement citizens can have with the waste landscapes generated by contemporary productive activity and responded by generating collective experiences in a context of fun. It also approaches global debates about the cultural institution as a place of care in which citizens generate affective bonds, by proposing construction and learning days in which citizens themselves put their knowledge to good use.
