Las Calatrava
KENÒPSIA
“When I was in the first year of secondary school, one day I went on a trip to the Forum of Cultures. Amid sandwiches, school tracksuits and photos with my friends, I realised that something big was happening.”
“Years later, working at a summer camp, I was there again. We went on a trip with the kids to the beaches by the Forum. A boy from another summer camp drowned while swimming. It took the emergency services more than two hours to get his body out because it was impossible to find him: the water was too dark.”
The Forum of Cultures was held in 2004 in Barcelona in an attempt to keep the Olympic flame alive for as long as possible and shortly before the emergence of the 15-M movement in 2011.
Holding the Forum meant covering the old neighbourhood of El Camp de la Bota (where Franco’s army shot 1,734 people during the Civil War) with an urban macro-complex measuring more than 30 hectares. This had a major ecological and social impact and today, almost twenty years later, it has still not found a way to engage with the public and is now a deserted area that is only of interest to the private sector.
Kenòpsia is a project that seeks to investigate how the fact that institutions create spaces supposedly aimed at the public has an impact on people and how public space is used.
What is a public space? And a space for participation? Can they be created artificially? What do the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the Design Museum in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Contemporary Art Centre in Malaga, the Niemeyer Centre in Avilés, the City of Light in Alicante and the Forum have in common?
The project has been supported by Erik Harley.
LINK:
instagram
Las Calatrava
KENÒPSIA
“When I was in the first year of secondary school, one day I went on a trip to the Forum of Cultures. Amid sandwiches, school tracksuits and photos with my friends, I realised that something big was happening.”
“Years later, working at a summer camp, I was there again. We went on a trip with the kids to the beaches by the Forum. A boy from another summer camp drowned while swimming. It took the emergency services more than two hours to get his body out because it was impossible to find him: the water was too dark.”
The Forum of Cultures was held in 2004 in Barcelona in an attempt to keep the Olympic flame alive for as long as possible and shortly before the emergence of the 15-M movement in 2011.
Holding the Forum meant covering the old neighbourhood of El Camp de la Bota (where Franco’s army shot 1,734 people during the Civil War) with an urban macro-complex measuring more than 30 hectares. This had a major ecological and social impact and today, almost twenty years later, it has still not found a way to engage with the public and is now a deserted area that is only of interest to the private sector.
Kenòpsia is a project that seeks to investigate how the fact that institutions create spaces supposedly aimed at the public has an impact on people and how public space is used.
What is a public space? And a space for participation? Can they be created artificially? What do the City of Arts and Sciences in Valencia, the Design Museum in Barcelona, the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Contemporary Art Centre in Malaga, the Niemeyer Centre in Avilés, the City of Light in Alicante and the Forum have in common?
The project has been supported by Erik Harley.
LINK:
instagram
