Ideas, strategies and projects that give rise to pilot projects. They tackle the challenges raised by the stakeholders involved and which are found in particular places in Barcelona or Medellín.
Gentrification is a process of urban transformation in which the original population of a run-down, impoverished sector or neighbourhood is gradually displaced by one with greater purchasing power as a result of programmes of reclassification of strategic urban spaces.
The workshop-project “Gentrificación no es un nombre de señora” (“Gentrificação: colonização urbana e instrumentalização da cultura” in Portuguese-speaking countries) is a response to an analysis of the role of culture in processes of gentrification.
To date, the workshop has been given in 11 cities: Madrid, Bilbao, Valencia, Barcelona, A Coruña, Murcia and Gijón (Spain), São Paulo and Brasilia (Brazil), and Bogotá (Colombia) and Lisbon (Portugal), and, in other formats, it has visited cities such as Rotterdam and Shanghai.
This exhibition presents the audiovisual materials produced about work with participants in some of the workshops.
The instrumentalization of culture in favour of these processes of altering the social composition thwarts most of the critical proposals based on artistic action, which are swallowed up by property, corporate or financial interests.
Gentrification particularly affects the collective memory of the neighbourhood, preventing the reconstruction of the past and leading to the loss of local identity.
It is the displaced who are ultimately affected by the process of gentrification.
Glocalization
We understand gentrification as an aspirational response of local governments to a policy of global urban development with the aim of implanting “brand cities”.
No two processes of gentrification evolve in the same way. We propose working locally, with the specificity that these processes develop in each context, area or city, to identify the tools that each community generates for addressing the global conflict.
Museum of the Displaced
We use the archive, without aspiring completely to define the displaced elements and typologies, as a tool for understanding and empathy towards everything that is lost in processes which, like that of gentrification, suppose the creation of exclusive spaces of social segregation.
Faced with the creation of closed communities, we propose the Museum of the Displaced as an ongoing open platform in a continual, necessarily collective process of development. It is also the collective that decides whether this is an archive of what should be forgotten or what should be recovered.
