La Citoyennetè
- La Citoyenneté. El centro en desplazamiento
This project consists on a series of “GUIDED VISITS” in some specific places looking to its relation to the construction of citizenship and landscape.
In the last years I have been developing some art pieces in the form of “Guided Visits” as a process to learn about the construction of landscape.
At the same time this learning process is taking place, artist investigation become a tool to construct (and deconstruct) established discourses.
There is a close relationship between social space and citizenship. The way space is constructed and lived, the definition of central spaces and spatial hierarchies... all these aspects affect to the exercise of citizenship.
One of the aims of this project is to investigate the relation of spatial configuration, citizenship and its history.
Only an explicit practice of citizenship can set up a real social space. The square, the passage, the boulevar are established forms of social spaces. I want to work with the story behind them, with the assumed forms of social spaces and their relation with landscape.
I did four “guided visit” in the city of Paris. I chose this city because of its tradition in developing urban typologies and also because its tradition in asking for citizen rights.
Each of these four “guided visits” is a public intervention in the form of a speech on a specific location in the city. The speech relates one specific space with something that had happened in this place some time before. The speeches are famous. As the speaker is the artist (myself), they are out of context and therefore they are heard and understood in a more general meaning.
These well known speeches are newly told, showing its constructions and also the failure (or success) of great discourses on citizenship and city building. It establishes a dialogue between what has been lived and what is supposed to be lived.
After this “Guided Tour” was done, a video from each of the places has been recorded. Each video is accompanied with a published guide where all the subtexts of the speech and the image are made visible.