This project seeks to explore the role of neighbourhood movements as creators of a new citizen identity and their impact on the city from a perspective that includes other forms of activism. Focusing on the role of women, who are often invisible, it aims to understand the neighbourhood struggle from a new perspective. We set up a workshop and a methodology that addresses this history through the memories of the neighbourhood's women residents.
Local
Spain
Orcasitas
Carabanchel
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
No
No
Yes
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): La Liminal Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Yolanda Last name of representative: Riquelme García Gender: Female Nationality: Spain Function: Coordination Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: C/ Miguel Ángel, 6, 4o A Town: Madrid Postal code: 28933 Country: Spain Direct Tel:+34645464554 E-mail:info@laliminal.com Website:https://www.laliminal.com/
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Yes
New European Bauhaus or European Commission websites
Memory of the neighbourhood struggle in Madrid is part of a research process that crosses cultural mediation with contemporary artistic practices as a tool to generate collective knowledge about the territory, in this case, about the processes of configuration of the southern periphery of Madrid.
This cultural mediation project aims to delve into the study and reflection on the process of articulation of these neighbourhoods, whose protagonists were the neighbourhood movements of the last years of Franco's dictatorship and the subsequent Transition, undoubtedly one of the social movements that most influenced the transformation of the city. A collective research is proposed that takes the form of a workshop in which we work together with neighbours, in a creative process that takes, on the one hand, the use of walking as an aesthetic, poetic and political tool and, on the other, cultural mediation as a strategy for the generation of collective knowledge that allows us to elaborate new narratives about the territory that can be shared through the use of the urban route.
In terms of inclusion:-We work with social sectors and neighbourhoods that are often made invisible.-The use of the route and memory as a working material makes the contents fully accessible to a wide public.-The participation of neighbours of all ages and backgrounds is essential for the development of the project, without citizen participation the project would not exist.In terms of sustainability:-A zero waste policy is held.-Spaces, tools and furniture belonging to the associations are reused.-It is not necessary to invest in new technology and materials thanks to the fact that the project is developed through the existing archive, conversation and walking. In terms of aesthetics: -The use of walking as a tool generates an experience of great emotional impact that make us rethink the ways we inhabit our context.-The use of fine art concepts applied to each material and activity proposed.
Citizen participation
Neighbours
Memory
Social movements
Women
The project itself helps to rethink the ways of making a city and of political incidence that citizens have at a time of ecosystemic challenge in which new forms of imagination are necessary. This reflection promotes environments of critical analysis on the environmental and housing crisis in a transversal way to the proposed activities.
Our actions address the fourth goal of the SDGs, which calls for redoubling efforts to protect and safeguard the world's cultural, tangible and intangible heritage, as this project simultaneously addresses several dimensions of heritage, both in its tangible and intangible dimensions, and explores the idea of culture in a broad way that is in tune with the current definition of cultural heritage.
It is important to highlight the following aspects:
-Rethinking the consumption of materials is something that is current from the planning of activities. It is not necessary to invest in new technology and materials thanks to the fact that the project is developed through the existing archive, conversation and walking.
-We reuse spaces, tools and furniture from neighbourhood associations.
-Through our activities we seek to revalue and rehabilitate disused spaces in the neighbourhood.
-The walk as a response to the workshops makes visible and revaluates the importance of this act on the use of transport.
In this sense, the development of the project throughout 2023 seeks to continue to deepen the knowledge treasured by the Orcasitas neighbourhood, as well as to continue immersing ourselves in other neighbourhoods that were involved in similar processes in the 1970s. We will begin with Carabanchel, replicating the methodology already experimented with to continue harvesting the memories and strategies of neighbourhood movements, with the desire to bring them to the present and connect the different territories to generate networks that can enrich the participating agents.
This project is an exercise in creative recovery of a part of history that is essential for the communities it addresses and that is rarely contemplated in the official narratives on the configuration of the city. Thus, the impact of generating practices that give legitimacy to their common history, their individual knowledge and their collective memory of this process, is a proposal of great social repercussion.
Approaching the most everyday territory, the neighbourhood where they live, from a perspective that values not only the process of dignifying the neighbourhood, but also the ways of inhabiting it and bringing it to life on a daily basis, in turn helps to transform the perception of this environment.
Residential neighbourhoods are generally understood as spaces where aesthetics is not a value, however, throughout the workshop we have been highlighting how the design of the space and its own aesthetics are a trace of all the struggles that this community has maintained in order to make their neighbourhood more habitable, in such a way that this aesthetic is also a part of their heritage that through collective walking is put in value.
This change in outlook generates a positive emotional impact that contributes to "neighbourhood pride" and the desire to continue disseminating what has been worked on in the workshop, in order to transmit this value to other people.
The use of walking as an aesthetic, poetic and political tool provides an experience of great emotional impact and significant learning, which puts into circulation new ways of understanding our context that make us rethink the ways of inhabiting it.
The neighbourhood communities with which the project has worked have been able to investigate, get to know and enrich their cultural fabric thanks to these meeting spaces created by the workshops and the routes created as a result of them.
The project incorporates actions that, in line with the issues addressed, contribute to the fulfilment of the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda.
The methodology of the project, an intergenerational workshop, aims to contribute to goals 4 and 5 that seek to ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education, promoting "lifelong learning opportunities", through creative, inclusive learning processes, to promote an exchange with pedagogical methodologies that are critical and participatory, using cultural mediation for the creation of collective knowledge, a series of tools that neighbourhood movements can appropriate and incorporate into their practices.
In addition, a large part of the subject matter addressed is directly related to the urban shaping of the city, aiming to create reflections on our urban environments and how they have developed, reflecting on the organisation of more inclusive, safe and sustainable spaces.
It is a project with a clear feminist vocation that contributes to the realisation of SDG 5, creating activities that investigate and make visible the representation of women in political and economic decision-making processes.
The process of the first workshop allowed, on the one hand, to incorporate voices often silenced in the narrative of neighbourhood movements in the city, the voice of women who also participated in these struggles, but from less visible positions.
This allowed us to share the knowledge they have been accumulating about alternative forms of organisation within the city in order to generate new ways of relating to the territory and to generate a sense of belonging to a place that has long been stigmatised in the collective imagination of the city.
The territorial framework of the research is located in the Orcasitas neighbourhood, a context chosen not only because it has been the central scenario of important mobilisations that mark major milestones in the neighbourhood movement and its impact on urban transformations, but also because it is an environment in which women, through housewives' associations and the Democratic Women's Movement, played an active role of great relevance.
This research proposal pursues results that are expected to benefit the public as a whole in the long run, leading to a greater understanding of the impact of social movements and the role of women in them, as well as their crucial intervention in the development of the contemporary city as we know it.
The project enriches existing knowledge of the genealogy of neighbourhood movements and the importance of women in them. In this way, it contributes the results to the scientific community, which will surely lead to new research that continues to explore lines of research that have not yet been sufficiently explored.
The development and dissemination of this type of research is of interest to citizens as a whole because it favours the promotion of a democracy based on the agency of a critical citizenry that reflects on its past and present in order to project itself into the future. In recent years, this history of neighbourhood movements has been highlighted, but usually from a heroic narrative that emphasises the figure of the movement's leaders and leaves aside the complex network that sustains these initiatives.The implementation of the workshop has allowed the people who have led these struggles to begin to understand them as such and to value their contributions.A recognition of their work, which goes beyond the protagonists and which, through the implementation of various initiatives throughout 2023, seeks to share this knowledge in order to invite society to open up to new forms of imagination that allow us to relaunch cit
At the beginning of the project we mapped neighbourhood associations and local associations working in the neighbourhood, without them the initiative could not be carried out. They are part of the programming, dissemination and implementation of each part.
We work with local, regional and national associations depending on each phase of the project.
We rely on the associations first to share the idea and adapt it to their environment, then to find spaces where the workshops can be held and finally to convene interested neighbours.
The activities are divided into two phases:
The first is the field work where the territory is explored in order to weave alliances that guarantee the participation of diverse agents in the next phase. Interviews are carried out with agents and networks are sought for the celebration and dissemination of the workshop.
The second phase is the workshops, which are usually held on a weekly basis, responding to three phases of work. In the first sessions, we work on the investigation of the territory, exploring and questioning it to extract the group's knowledge, from which we design an urban route that sets in motion everything that has been elaborated during the workshop and which focuses especially on the use of contemporary art strategies in its design. Finally, this route becomes a day open to all interested people in order to communicate to the rest of the neighbourhood.
If we understand that citizen participation in local, national and international thinking and action is fundamental in the redefinition of the relationship between the public and the private, and between the local, the national and the global, this is a type of project that goes beyond the barriers of the local to have an international projection in terms of the concepts dealt with and the impact it can generate.
Focusing on the memory of neighbourhood movements, the memory of the working class and the role of women in both spheres is an approach that allows us to question the official narrative we have inherited on these issues and to be able to develop more complex readings that complement those already known.
To this end, we propose an approach to history that is constructed from a critical perspective that allows us to relate this historical moment to our present and to reflect both on the events addressed and on the way in which they have reached us, using cultural mediation as a strategy for the creation of collective knowledge, which also allows us to incorporate questions and methodologies from the social sciences, as well as others taken directly from contemporary artistic practices.
Cultural mediation allows us to bring all these disciplines into conversation by welcoming the knowledge brought by those who participate in the proposals, so that each participant in the workshop brought their own area of knowledge and put it into dialogue with the rest of the group.
Also proposed are a series of themes for reflection that are currently occupying a large part of the concerns of contemporary culture, such as: memory, identity, creative processes, the shaping of the city, gender studies, among others....
The incorporation of strategies taken from contemporary art practices introduces, on the one hand, the creative dimension and, on the other, pedagogical innovation in the different phases of the project, which are accompanied by collectives. In such a way that we have an impact on the creation of significant formative experiences both through our direct action and in the development of the workshops.
Although in recent years there have been many research projects on neighbourhood movements in Madrid in the 1970s, what is innovative about this proposal is on the one hand the methodology used and on the other the idea of focusing on what has yet to be narrated.
This research proposal pursues results that are expected to benefit the public as a whole in the long run, leading to a greater understanding of the impact of social movements and the role of women in them, as well as their crucial intervention in the development of the contemporary city as we know it.
We have done this through a methodology that allows us to generate situated knowledge about what the neighbourhoods are like now and how they got here. Using walking as an aesthetic, poetic and political practice, we have dived into memories that are often not placed at the centre, in order to give them value and place them in relation to other events in their context that have already become part of the official narratives of the histories of these territories.
As a methodology that will be replicated in different neighbourhoods in Madrid that share a past determined by their citizens' initiatives, the project aims to enrich the knowledge that already exists about the genealogy of neighbourhood movements and the importance of women in them. The results will thus contribute to the enrichment of the scientific community, which will surely lead to new research that will continue to explore lines of research that have not yet been sufficiently explored.
The project's aim and vocation is to be a programme that promotes territorial cohesion. It is a research project with a very local focus, specifically centred on two neighbourhoods in Madrid, Orcasitas and Carabanchel, but whose dynamics and memory resonate not only in other neighbourhoods of the city, but also in other territories of the Community. The processes experienced by the working-class neighbourhoods go beyond the local sphere and can find resonances in multiple territories both nationally and internationally.
In this sense, it is important to emphasise that although the workshops and the urban route invite us to analyse the phenomena from a radically local perspective, the issues addressed always lead us to global questions that can be reproduced in many other territories.
The methodology of the workshops and the use of the route is transferable to any other territory as a tool for recovering memory.
The project aims to continue experimenting with cultural mediation formats that cross contemporary artistic practices with community activation work oriented towards creative experimentation, exploring forms of enquiry about the territory that combine the hybridisation of knowledge with the idea of generating situated knowledge and that result in a creative practice that is returned to the community itself to enrich it.
This project has a clear collaborative vocation, seeking to involve different actors from civil society. This type of project that addresses global issues of historical memory crosses regional, national and international barriers. They serve as an "example" for common projects and create possible synergies between different actors and territories.
Throughout the development of the project, different methodologies have been combined to weave a complex network of knowledge around the experience of neighbourhood movements and their impact on the configuration of the city. In the first phase, fieldwork was combined with bibliographical research.
A first approach to the neighbourhood in which to contrast what has already been narrated in the official circuits with the narratives that unfold among the agents, holding conversations with the neighbourhood associations, spaces dedicated to the promotion of equality, etc.
In the second phase of work, the workshop format is used with the neighbours. Designed from the perspective of cultural mediation, its objective was to generate a space where they could put their memories of the territory into circulation and we could collectively generate new readings of these memories that related, on the one hand, the memories of the participants, which allowed us to generate a more complex story, and on the other hand, link these memories with the evolution of the neighbourhood and the social movements in it.
In some sessions, we played with the evocation of memory through the landscape, recalling what the neighbourhood was like when the participants arrived there, playing only with the images they remembered. In others, the image was brought from that which is already fixed and which belongs to very vindicated narratives, such as photographs of the mobilisations, of the neighbourhood leaders, of the banners and their messages, with the idea of activating other memories that are also personal but are connected in another way with the collective. We also use cartography, projecting the original layout of the neighbourhood onto the current one through memory. In short, it was an open process that sought to dive into different dimensions of the group's life experience in order to enhance it and build a new narrative of the neighbourhood based on it.
The development of projects aimed at making this recent history of citizens' movements visible is fundamental because of the educational potential it has and can have. This type of research and creation is of interest to citizens as a whole because it encourages the promotion of a democracy based on the agency of a critical citizenship that reflects on its past and present in order to project itself into the future.
The project currently proposes to work on local solutions because we believe that each neighbourhood has its own particularities, but even so, by developing this proposal in different neighbourhoods, we think that in the future we can build a memory of the neighbourhood network at a national level.
Many countries that have suffered dictatorships have not taken the time to carry out a critical review that includes citizens, nor have they introduced pedagogical material in their schools. We believe that this project makes visible a global challenge to review and study the historical past of countries from a new perspective. Focusing on neighbourhood associations and their importance in the current and past social fabric is something transformative and innovative that can have a global impact by proposing new ways of collective action.
Results and outcomes 2022: Prioritising the places and people that need it the most.
- Multi-level engagement: Civil society organisations, public administration and cultural institutions have been involved.
- Integrated approach: Our practice was developed from the confluence of disciplines to generate more complex views of our context. We have been able to observe how this approach has contributed to the neighbours finding new ways of communicating and expressing their stories and knowledge.
- Potential for transferability: The project can be replicated in different areas of the outskirts of Madrid in order to map the phenomenon of neighbourhood movements in depth and gain a better understanding of it. In 2023 we will replicate it in Carabanchel and the idea is to continue expanding the fields of action.
Initiative development plan 2023-2024.
Scope of the results: we seek to expand this activity to new neighbourhoods. During 2023 we will work in Carabanchel and our medium-term proposal is to be able to continue in other neighbourhoods in Madrid that share this history of neighbourhood movements.
Expected benefits direct and indirect beneficiaries: In this 2023 proposal, materials will be produced from the workshops and tours that will allow the results of the research in the neighbourhood to be disseminated in schools. A booklet of activities for schools and teacher training will be created. Thus, neighbours, associations, schools, teachers and pupils will all benefit.
We believe that training teachers with techniques that collect past knowledge and nurture it with the act of walking fosters a new competence in sustainability.
