en

12 Kitchen Monument
Raumlabor
Duisburg, Mülheim, Hamburg, Warschau, Giessen, Berlín,
Hannover, Liverpool
2006-2011
www.kuechenmonument.de
www.raumlabor.net

Kitchen Monument is a changing mobile sculpture. The sculpture is a sheet of steel that can be made into a traditional collective space when the balloon covering it is inflated. The new space can house several activities at once. Kitchen Monument becomes a prototype for building temporary communities.

The project has visited several towns. It stops in potentially underrated places, non-areas that seem to have lost their urban functions. The balloon is placed anywhere it fits and its transparency promotes a dialogue between the inside and outside: everything is blurred but also visible. A new area is created within this existing space and, in this way new qualities are allowed to appear. The Trojan horse is a good metaphor for our project since we use the monument to create urban identity. This mobile structure highlights the specific qualities of the place and enables people to actively work together to recreate a public space by providing new features.

Kitchen Monument approaches the subject of sustainability on an urban and architectural scale. It is designed to work as a tool to reactivate and use public spaces. Its main characteristic is that it only expands where and when necessary, while only using up one parking space and consumes no natural resources. It only becomes a public building in accordance with a specific activity in a specific place and can comfortably house one hundred and twenty people in practically any climatic conditions.

11 Spacebuster
Raumlabor
Nova York, USA
2009
www.raumlabor.net

Spacebuster was developed and designed to explore public space in New York. It is a research tool that acts like a transformer of architecture and social space within the urban space.

Spacebuster is modelled upon the basis of a delivery van with a large inflatable area which comes out of the back of the vehicle and can hold up to eighty people. The inflatable structure is translucent so the people inside can see what’s going on outside and vice versa. The fabric acts like a semi-permeable border between that which is public and private. Thus, the area turns into a backdrop of the scene viewed from inside and the Spacebuster into a stage, as if it were a public theatre play. The local projections can be seen on the fabric both from outside and inside. Depending on the programme held on  the Spacebuster, the area can be furnished with different fittings (writing desks, seats or tables).

Travelling through Manhattan and Brooklyn for nine consecutive nights, Spacebuster organized several events which were the result of collaboration with Raumlabor Berlin, Storefront for Arts and Architecture and different local art institutions, non profit organizations and communities. The mixture of the most formal formats —workshops, lectures, projections— with easy to follow daily activities such as dinners, bar service and parties, provided a special ambience and they were also used to highlight what was going on in the public space.

10 UMPA
Unitat Mòbil de Prèstecs d´Art
Cristian Añó i David Armengol
Barcelona, Espanya
2004

MALU is a project that considers an act of appropriating the formal codes of how a library works and applying them to the visual formats typical of objects of art. In this way, the fourth module of Mobile Museums becomes a space which promotes the possibility of exchanging, transporting and consuming contemporary art production, thus involving itself in the social fabric which makes up the public sphere of Can Fabra.

Beyond the usual systems of receiving the work of art, MALU tests other formulas of access to art creation, leaving out the agents running the art system, who are now being seen from a critical viewpoint in a utopian, naive attempt to subvert the mechanisms of the middleman (merchant) between works of art and the public with the aim of giving the public the final responsibility when faced with the exhibition event.
With this change of art practices, a new rational area of literature and the library system is created at the centre, and a new relational area where all the usual categories that define the art circuit are in a state of preventive art suspension.

At the MALU space you can find video works, poly-poetical actions, performances to stage, take photographs, see paintings, drawings, installations... both at home and in the same area.

09 The Floating Museum
Floating Lab Collective
Washington DC, USA.
2009-2011
www.floatinglabcollective.org

The Floating Museum originated in the Floating Lab Collective, a group of artists from the metropolitan area of Washington DC, who use public space as a context for their reflection and creations. The Floating Museum was designed as a mobile space derived from the collective’s experiences as citizens.

It consists of a van, similar to the travelling vans that sell food, transformed so that it can provide an area for exhibitions, performances, projections, meetings and projects. The museum analyzes how art institutions can design actions that include a society that is in constant motion which moves and expands toward the outskirts.

The Floating Museum sees mobility in the context of social and economic parameters. Firstly, mobility is paramount to being an immigrant. The presence of immigrants triggers a series of social and spatial movements and their movements transform the urban landscape. Examples of how immigrants adapt are community centres that provide social services and programmes or the vans that sell “tacos” and travel from worksite to worksite, along paths without sidewalks created by the immigrant workers who travel there from the outskirts. The Floating Lab Collective is interested in these workers who travel from the outskirts to the city centre every day, and see urban spaces as aggressive and conflictive and explore the affects of this mobility on our cities, for instance, changing traffic flows and transforming the city’s weather and space.

08 Burn Station
Platoniq
Mèxic DF, Bogotà, Madrid, Berlín, París,
Marsella, Florència, Bruselas, Lima, Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, Estrasburg, Cambridge, Xangai
2004-2011
www.platoniq.net
www.burnstation.net

Burn Station: Featuring the production and free distribution of net labels music and net-radio programmes. Self-service distribution in public spaces. Dissemination of information on free audio licences, formats and collaboration networks.

In a space open to the public, an audio file consultation and downloading point is set up with different net labels and net-radios. The users/publishers may make a selection of files, record them on a CD-R and take them home.

Burn Station is based on the development of software for the GNU/Linux operating system and a local server. This free distribution/dissemination audio-text kit works as a self service for digital contents. It is a data base for mp3 and text that automates the process of selecting, recording and printing files. The Burn Station software has been distributed under free licence since September 2004.

07 La Fanzinoteca Ambulant
Lluc Mayol, Matias Rossi, Ricardo Duque
Barcelona, Espanya
2005-2011
www.fanzinoteca.net

The Travelling Fanzineotheque is a travelling reference module which contains a collection of fanzines, hand made books and other publications that are hard to define and was inspired by the fanzinoteca de Saladestar, a reading room which was located in the neighbourhood of Gràcia in Barcelona between 2005 and 2007.

When the Saladestar closed down in 2007, we decided to make a cardboard module, on the structure of a table tennis table with wheels we had found in the street. This module can carry some five-hundred fanzines approximately and has a computer with which to check the data base.

The project began with the aim of taking this module to different public areas to create mobile reference points and offer parallel activities related with self-managed publications and small publishers.
Meanwhile the Fanzineotheque carries out research on this kind of publications with the aim of publishing its fanzines named Minca and La pequeña Minca Ilustrada, besides being involved in the “Jamzines”, or open practical workshops where participants can find an array of materials to spontaneously make a publication themselves, guided by the Fanzineotheque team.
The Fanzineotheque currently has six-hundred and eighty issues listed and over eight-hundred issues yet to be listed, which can be consulted in Santa Eulàlia Street in Barcelona, when the module is not travelling.

06 Museo de la Defensa de Madrid
Tom Lavin
Madrid, Espanya
2007
www.antimuseo.org

The Defence Museum in Madrid is part of a reflection on the memory and identity of Spanish society, which I began after returning from Mexico in 2001. It all started with a subterranean presence, which is related to my previous project on mass graves: an air raid shelter below Juan Bautista Street in Toledo, quite close to where the Ojo Atómico headquarters lay between 2003 and 2007. This shelter was closed for almost seventy years and practically everyone had forgotten about it.

My first idea was to work on the same location, taking advantage of the symbolic potential provided by its hidden existence, but I suddenly realized that the defence of Madrid is an historical event that far surpassed the one I originally had for the shelter, and I thought of a fiction museum to which I resorted for several ideas. The first was to mobilize citizens and seek the support of several groups to vindicate the establishment of the museum in the Prosperidad neighbourhood, with the specific reference point of the shelter. The second idea was a temporary museum in an empty space in the Prosperidad market. This where the vindictive action would be combined with the museum’s “temporary headquarters”.

I finally decided on a travelling museum. An object that had sculptural features, but would only be activated as a performance where people could interpret both its artistic and political scope. I approached the fragility of historical memory in an object that was hard to define. Furthermore I discovered an infinite number of small marks left by the war which the dictatorship had failed to erase. A travelling museum would be able to reveal these marks in situ and re-interpret the urban space.

05 CPAC
Centro Portátil de Arte Contemporáneo Antimuseo
Mèxic DF, Mèxic
2009-2011
www.antimuseo.org

On a practical level, the Antimuseum has evolved from a “conventional” model of alternative space where the focus was on the needs of artists, and on creating a physical, discursive and social area of the hegemonic to provide a number of conditions of creative freedom that do not exist in other areas, to a model focused on the public. That is, it aims to now create an area where the public is shaped around subaltern discourses, creating a channel for these discourses and providing a way to get one’s hands on (counter) publics.

As a consequence, the Antimuseum projects have developed physical and methodological participation devices, usually aimed at specific subjects such as gender violence or historical memory used to compare the discourse produced with a heterodox arts management practice. The PCAC is the most notable and effective result of this research.

The Portable Contemporary Art Centre is a low-cost mobile device designed to test new experiments in the field of visual arts. Its function is to both detonate creative processes and “mark” the urban fabric.
The PCAC creates a link between the strategies of re-appropriation of public space by disadvantaged collectives —racial minorities, travelling salesmen, prostitutes, immigrants, homosexuals in repressive contexts, certain women’s collectives ... —and art practices which directly affect the city.

04 Mesa Rodante
Móvil
Adriana García Galán
Beirut, Líban
2005
http://nomargen.free.fr

This project consists of a revolving round table, with four live microphones with amplifiers and designed to travel through the city of Beirut while discussing previously selected subjects based on surveys made with the public. The voices of those who are arguing are linked by an intricate system of cables between each microphone, thus making eye contact difficult. People with opposing views on different subjects are invited to take part, and topics can be specific ones on the city or different views on general subjects. The sessions were recorded in video to be later played in public.

03 Museo de la Calle
Colectivo Cambalache
Bogotà, Colombia
1998
http://museodelacalle.tripod.com

The Museo de la Calle is made up of a collection of miscellaneous objects picked up in the streets by exchanges made with passers-by. Based on a project aimed at exchanging goods, the group began to “tread the streets” on top of Speedy, a go kart –or wooden box on wheels – inviting people to make an unlimited transaction with the proposal; shall we swap?
The changing collections of objects in this paradoxical museum bears witness to the diversity of everyday life in the streets and human and social relationships we establish through objects and material culture.
Navigating through urban areas, the Museo de la Calle stops at any corner to exhibit its collection and exchange its contents with the public. Exhibiting in the street is to recognize a public, some of whom are illiterate, and surprised by an exhibition that looks more like a travelling market stall, a joke or leg pulling or a sweet stall. They come face to face with a museum when they had not planned to visit any.

With the specific aim of making art by exchanging goods with other people, we set out in search of intimate moments in public spaces and “poetical events” which gave meaning to human and social relationships in everyday urban life.

Since 1998 the museum has travelled the streets of Bogota, Ljubljana, Seville, Barcelona, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Paris, Berne, Alcorcón, Istanbul, and Coslada.

02 Motocarro
Domènec
Manresa, Espanya
2009-2010
www.domenec.net

This project is based on the construction of a three-wheeler van similar to the one that appeared in the movie Plácido, shot almost entirely on location in Manresa in 1961 and deemed to be one of Luis G. Berlanga’s best films. The department of self-propulsion at the Lacetània Secondary school in Manresa included in its pedagogical programme the recovery and restoration of an old vehicle similar to the one in the film. Once restored and modified, this vehicle becomes a “commemorative monument” in motion, an ironic device and critical memory capsule which, when travelling through the streets, evokes the social landscape of the film and places it in the social context of developing countries by showing the similitude of the mechanisms of an economy of subsistence and social exclusion. The reconstructed three-wheeler van may be used for many tasks and could be the catalyser of different events: such as a small, mobile multimedia device, as a support for an open air video projector and using its loudspeakers to communicate and diffuse the activities of different groups in Manresa.

Those participating in the project were: Jordi Aligué Pujals, Balan Mihaita Catalin, Dima Nicolae Alexandra and Joan Segarra Jordana, students from the Institut Lacetània led by teacher Pere Izquierdo Maria.

01 Galería Callejera
Pablo Rojas Schwartz
Santiago, Xile

2004-2011
www.galeriacallejera.cl

Galería Callejera (Street Gallery) is a travelling exhibition area that features multidisciplinary art works. It can cover long distances exhibiting works in motion or can be stationary in specific areas. Thus, it can be seen by a type of public that does not usually visit conventional museums or galleries. This allows the works to gather a heterogeneous public from different social and economic backgrounds.
The first design of GaleríaCallejera was held around fifteen exhibitions during its first four years in action. Thanks to funding from Fondart 2009, a new, much larger GaleríaCallejera was built with more space to view the exhibitions using iron and acrylic windows and a hold was built to carry equipment and luggage; the GaleríaCallejera was designed to reach a maximum of one hundred kilometres per hour. This new GaleríaCallejera fulfils the function of covering long distances creating cultural exchanges in other places around the country and abroad.