Recovering public space:
gentrification, control, surveillance

• Days: July 28 and 29, 2021
• Time: 10:30 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
• Location: Auditori
• Payment activity (€ 40) with prior registration and limited places
• 10% discount for Amics d’Es Baluard Museu*

Es Baluard Museu programs a workshop given by Antoni Muntadas with Blanca Pujals collaboration. It will be held in parallel to the seminar “Architecture and the city. Give back life”, on the same dates, and to the exhibition “Memory of defense: physical and mental architectures” that can be visited at the Museum until September 26.

The exhibition features the project by Antoni Muntadas Closed/Locked (2020), developed during the period of lockdown in New York, which focuses on the ways in which urban architecture responds to different and even contradictory situations, such as fear caused by the pandemic or protests against police violence.

From the visual arts, but also from the territory of the social sciences —as anthropology, sociology, ecology or mass media—, the workshop “Recovering public space: gentrification, control, surveillance” proposes to rethink the urban space we occupy. The pandemic has made evident some mechanisms, previously imperceptible or not very visible. What phenomena shape our cities and our movements? How is the urban-political fabric generated? What agents control, monitor and shape the public sphere, and for what reasons?

Biographies

Antoni Muntadas

He has developed a recognized international career over more than five decades based on his radical interest in the interrelation between arts, communication and social sciences. Many projects, such as those included in the On Translation, The Construction of Fear, About Academia or Asian Protocols series, use various contemporary configuration modes, such as video, multimedia installations, the Internet, photographs, actions, publications or urban interventions, with which he addresses socio-political issues with close attention to the context. Likewise, Muntadas has given courses, seminars and workshops in a large number of institutions in Europe, America and Asia.

Until 2014 he has been a professor at the Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) at the Department of Architecture at MIT, and currently at the IUAV, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, in Venice. In recent years architecture, urbanism and the city have become one of the fundamental interests of his projects.

Blanca Pujals

Architect, spatial researcher and critical writer. Her cross-disciplinary practice uses spatial research and critical analysis to engage with questions around the geographies of power on bodies and territories, policies of scientific and technological knowledge production, as well as transnational politics, developing tools for undertaking analysis through different visual and sonic devices. Her work encompasses film, architecture, lecturing, curatorial projects, teaching and critical writing.

Her recent projects are the video-essays “Specular Technologies. The construction of Fear and Desire”, “Bodily Cartographies: Pathologizing the body and the city” (Essay published in The Funambulist nº7) and “A Synthetic Universe” (Essay Published in ‘The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture’ by Arts Catalyst); the curatorial project “Geographies and forms of power” (Tabakalera, Donosti), and curator of the Public Program for the exhibition “Recetas Urbanas: Affection as Subversive Architecture” at The Showroom, London.

*Applying the promotional CODE. Friends will receive it in their email. Request it if you have not received it: marketing01@esbaluard.org