ABSTRACT
Early in February 2014 we received an email inviting us to join a project that went by the name of Atlas, the purpose and contents of which remained mysteriously concealed from us. The message included a document that ‘defined Atlas’ and was structured into six headings or chapters: Map-Territory, PauseSequence, Myth-Ritual, Public-Private Space, Critical Object-Accumulation, and Ephemeral-Unfinished. The document resembled, perhaps, the catalogue of an exhibition-to-be. Some forty people were copied into the original email, most of them
belonging to a young cohort of artists, architects and cultural mediators that have over the last ten years coalesced around a project for ‘free culture’ activism in Madrid. These included architectural collectives Basurama and Zuloark with whom we had ourselves been carrying out fieldwork in the city over the past three years. As it turned out, Atlas was the graduate research project of Madrid-based
scenographer, Jacobo García. Despite his youth, García was already well known in various activist circles in Madrid for his creative re-appropriation of a number of occupied spaces in the city by using the language and resources of theatre. This proved to be a novelty in a city whose tradition of occupation had long been dominated by the discourses of political economy and autonomism. In this context, the symbolic and material resources of theatre offered a somewhat different repertoire of analytical formswith which to explore notions of public, private and common spaces; engagement, movement and participation; or affect, embodiment and care. Over the following months, those who remained interested in the project
were asked to produce a ‘box’ for one of the chapter headings in the Atlas document. These boxes would eventually be used to produce an installation performance for Jacobo’s graduation viva at Madrid’s School of Drama Studies. The call to put ‘inside’ a box some of the sources that characterized the work of well-known ‘outdoors’ activists was a provocation of sorts. However, as it evolved over time, Atlas’s explicit convocation of an urban-wide apparatus of free culture activism took issue with the very notion of the city as a ‘source’ for common life. The many collaborators that Atlas strategically mobilized had long been struggling and working in ‘open-sourcing’ their own
architectural or artistic practice in the city. For these collectives, the toolkits of open-source and free culture activism offered a stock of technical and legal, conceptual and political resources with which to refurnish the infrastructural and political capacities of the city (Corsín Jiménez 2014). Yet what Atlas managed to accomplish rather spectacularly was to thea-
tricalize the alleged symmetry of all such projects as sources of urban openness. For example, one participant created small sculptures of ‘congealed affects’ produced by melting wax over objects and mementoes of significance to her, generating a form that was then emptied-out of the material that supported it (see Figure 11.1). These affects were meant to crystallize and make visible the emotional turbulence and topological intensity of specific urban relations. The architectural collective Zuloark, for its part, was challenged to build a ‘street parliament’ that would serve as ‘democratic furniture’ for people assembling to discuss matters publicly in the open air (see Figure 11.2a, b). Each intervention thus captured different ‘sources’ of the idea of the city as an ‘open source’, and triggered unsettling relations of symmetry between them. The form of theatre – the material, spatial and temporal resources through which the illusions of spectatorship, engagement or performance are designed in a theatrical production – functioned in this context to hold fleetingly and fragilely together the idea of the city as a radical and symmetrical form of openness. Atlas drew on the dramaturgical resources of theatrical productions to
design what we might refer to as an ‘ecology of open sources’ for the city. It literally laid out an ecological, scenographic and cartographic artefact that
was itself sourced on the radical praxis of well-known free culture activists in Madrid (see Figure 11.3). In this sense, we may think of Atlas as a pluriverse: a world invested with a commitment towards radical and emergent openness. Yet such a pluriverse was short-lived. It was a product of artistic design, a theatrical experiment. In this chapter we want to explore some of the issues raised by the pro-
duction of Atlas, in particular the political and infrastructural imagination of the city as an ‘ecology of open sources’ – or as we shall refer to it hereafter, an ecology in beta. Such an ecology, we shall argue, challenges some of the descriptive and conceptual conventions of recent social and urban theory. On the one hand, the work of free culture activists helps cast new light on how and where politics is sourced and re-sourced in the city. This notion of ‘re-sourcing’
will play an important part in our argument. Re-sourcing points to the materiality that subtends all political work, at the same time as it interrogates the nature of its sourcing – its foundations and support structures but also its springs and openings.1 Re-sourcing offers an alternative location from where to describe what the city is made up of and how we get to know it. As the example of Atlas already illustrates, whatever the political might turn out to be, it is hardly just a space of representation, reclamation or participation. The political is also re-sourced on affective, choreographic and infrastructural dimensions that contribute to its holding in place (see also Corsín Jiménez, Estalella and the Zoohaus Collective 2014) On the other hand, the notion of an ecology in beta calls also for re-examining
social theory’s own ‘re-sourcing’ as a methodological and critical design for social life. It helps us articulate a question about the sources and resources that we use in the making of theory, as well as about theory more amply as an open-source endeavour. We may want to ask, for example, what it would take to open-source the methods and infrastructures of theory-making in the social sciences (and anthropology in particular). Finally, the question of re-sourcing helps us make visible what we believe is
an important distinction about the ontologies subtending political life. Thus, the scenography of experiment that Atlas set on stage exemplifies contemporary interest in the emergent dynamics of affect and material vitalism that traverse systems thinking today. Atlas presents in this light a view of cityness as an ontology that sources the open. Yet there is an alternative take on the idea of ontological openness that is
afforded by a focus on re-sourcing. We will describe a project carried out hand in hand with guerrilla architectural collectives and various community organizations in Madrid when we came to realize that the move from ‘sources’ to ‘re-sourcing’ demanded our collective designing of an infrastructure of apprenticeships. Re-sourcing apprenticeships, the city emerged not just as an ontology that sources the open but as an open-source ontology.
