Where the city loses its name
Book with 100 color pages
Catalog number: WTCLIN.001
© 2020, LaFundició, Binaural Nodar, Fundatia AltArt

This publication does not attempt to conclude two years worth of work and collaboration between LaFundició, Binaural Nodar and Alt- Art – the collectives behind the project Where the city loses its name. It is better understood as a type of artefact which condenses some of the debates and exchanges that we have had during this time. Where the city loses its name is of course articulated within a broader time frame since the connections between the three collectives and the territories where we develop our action precedes the project, and will continue once it has ended.

The history of the shantytowns is in many ways an uncomfortable one. Their memory calls into question the linear and simplistic accounts of modern progress, including the central pillars of urbanisation and industrialisation. Despite being relegated to oblivion and left unrepresented, the neighbourhoods of shacks were – and still are today – an essential part of the urban development which served to absorb, at minimum expense, the large swathes of population required by new industry. At the same time, the shantytowns also served to push the undesirable individuals and groups of people considered unproductive out to the margins of the city. We can understand the shantytowns as a political entity in their own right, with their own forms of organisation, cultural practices, and not just as a subsidiary of the formal city or an urban excrescence. From this position, from the shack, we begin to see that the inhabitants are not simply passive victims of a situation outside of their control, but that they have agency, will, and fight.

Much of what has been said and written about the shantytowns is regarding ways in which to eradicate them. Urban planners, sociologists, social workers, educators… They have preoccupied themselves with conducting studies, reports, and blueprints with the objective of making them disappear. These documents are, for the large part, what has constructed our perception of shantytowns and their inhabitants. They are the memory that we have, as a society, of the barracas. Considering that memory is not something that is given, but rather something that is necessary to produce, we ask: What sort of memory can we produce outside of the archives? Who, as opposed to the experts, has the right to remember and represent?

To look at the past doesn’t usually serve so much as to settle precisely which things happened and when they happened, but rather to offer us an explanation for our present. Finding new points of view from which to examine the past, creating situations in which other voices can be heard, producing tools of communication that others can appropriate … These are the strategies to collectively build plural, discrepant and more complex versions of our present.