Toledo Creates Toledo
6 actions at Toledo city center and exhibition at the cultural space ECAT
Team: Enrique Espinosa, Diana Hernández, Almudena Mestre, Carlos Mínguez, Alejandra Navarrete, David Pérez, Rocío Pina, Carmelo Rodríguez (PKMN)
First Prize, call for exhibition projects ECAT 2007
Sept - Oct 2007
Toledo, Spain.
Toledo Creates Toledo is the first iteration of a research initiative called City Creates City. Revolving around the notion of civic identity, this platform of thought and action aims for social and spatial innovation through a series of site specific urban interventions in different contexts.
City Creates City uses action and direct experimentation to test our architectural tools and knowledge, and to propose new spaces of relationship with the public. On the other hand, this initiative blurs the limit between the architect’s studio, the gallery, and the city. The exhibition space remains open and accessible during workshops, actions, production and mounting processes, offering other form of engagement with the different actors and audiences. Lastly, City Creates City questions the demarcation between the concept, production, representation and presentation of an architect’s work.
With the ambition to combine art, architecture and public action, Toledo Creates Toledo proposes an exhibition site where the citizen is a conscious actor of his critical and creative capacity in the transformation of the urban environment.
Revolving around concepts such as identity, perception, body, memory, mapping, public space and ecology, the project proposes six actions performed in the city that consider the citizen as an active agent and protagonist. The exhibition space is designed as a working laboratory where the visitor not only observe an artist/architect work but also takes part and participates in the creative and production process during a ten-day long event. PKMN only coordinates, administers and filters and their citizens create.
1. Action 01: Travelling photo booth installed in different locations during three days, Caceres.
2. Mounting process at the exhibition space.
3. Action 02: 1:1 reconstruction of a Toledo house, composed by furniture and fixtures found in the city's recycling center.
4. Action 02: Archeological totem of domestic consumption at the gallery space, proposing an image of an apparent obsolescence of the city's interiors.
5. Action 03: Collective city map composed by more than 500 images taken at a urban photographic safari. Participants unveiled and photographed different structures and scenes at the city center of Toledo.
6. Action 04: Ephemeral gathering where all were invited to play with soap bubbles, duplicating for a second the symbols and monuments of the historical center of Toledo.
7. Action 04: Evanescent city reflections.
8. Action 05: Gallery space during the one-day long drawing session where people could trace their city paths—through the recollection of remote urban detours and images—in the body of a different person.
All photos by PKMN