Sin Estado: DEMOCRACIA
Sin Estado is a project born from the collaboration of Santiago Cirugeda, Democracia and Todo por la Praxis, proposing a multidisciplinary intervention from the art and the architecture realm in the context of the illegal settlement in La Cañada Real (Madrid), at the moment put under a process of evacuation and demolition. From the Seventies this establishment has been growing up and its social configuration has become more complex, lodging more than two thousand houses and almost forty thousand inhabitants, with no few antagonisms: Spaniards cohabit with foreigners, the illegal drug traffic with the real estate businesses, shanty houses with villas and hotels in front of country houses.
Sin Estado offers a double reading from his name: the use of public funds destined to the art which have been turned aside to interventions of social character, in a space like La Cañada Real in which the same administration refuses itself to carry out any public service; as well as Sin Estado alludes to this territory deregulated and marginal as far as the legal and administrative structures.
The project Sin Estado proposes La Cañada Real to be subject of study and work in progress, paying attention to the development of this space outside the limits of the administrative control. Also the aim is to put in context the specific projects of La Cañada Real comparing it to other similar situations, like the construction of a civic centre in the gypsy town of Penamoa (in A Coruña) carried out by Santiago Cirugeda, or the shooting of the demolition of the shanty town Salobral (Madrid) by Democracia.
Sin Estado tries to think from a practical point of view about potentialities and contradictions of the artistic work in the social sphere, approaching La Cañada Real from different perspectives of action: from the cartography to the negotiation with the social movements seated there for granting infrastructures or services of communitarian use; from the generation of territory visualization processes to a reflection on the contradictions of the own process.
Project Sin Estado is contextualized in a programme of other similar urban interventions, carried by Democracia and Cirugeda, as respectively in the Salobral district in Madrid and in the village Penamoa in A Coruña. The exhibition also includes documentation about these projects: scale models and photography of the realization, to testify a shared wish of creating a web of actions toward the rehabilitation and renovation of marginal districts in our cities.
