Presented in:
Antwerp
From 21th to 28th of November 2017 – Stealing the mountain. From Park Spoor Noord to Atelier In Situ3
29th of November 2017- Opening of the free land. Atelier In Situ3 de la Royal Academy of Fine Arts.
I read that the first century without TERRA INCÓGNITA has already passed,
no land out of the map.
BUT
One mountain has been stolen, now and for one week is out of the domain coordinates, waiting to be shaped,
in between materia
cartographers of the future, come!
out of the limits of the map there are dragons.
The material was subtracted in its intermediate state, before materializing in infrastructures and urban architectures. Once released in its new location was declared as «Terra Incognita» and remained for a week outside the control and domination systems , declared as construction material of collective utopian desires.
By the time i arrived to live in Antwerp large constructions extended from the center of the city to the periphery. Creating arbitrary identity landscapes composed of fences, lights, signs, signs, cranes, alternative roads, detours, holes and mountains. Spaces of confusion that accompanied me on my daily journeys. Hostile and noisy conglomerate of disproportionate scales for the pedestrian, characterised mainly by the traffic that made proliferate in me a feeling of continuous strangeness as if the urban space were reduced to a great no-place. Works that point towards the construction of a future city over which the citizen has barely control capacity.
In the instinctive search for acceptance and identification with this new urban landscape, a series of mountains of construction material that were scattered throughout the city appeared as a reference to nature, bringing some comfort against the chaotic urbanity that extended around us. Some of them moved and changed shape with the passing of days, others had been in the same place for so long that they had developed vegetation and presented themselves as vestiges of a nature that survived the urban full.
Through collective displacement of the land, the aim was to challenge the conception of the urban space as a static entity over which we have no capacity for alteration and highlight the possibilities of appropriation in our environment that become possible over processes of collective intervention.
Some publications were distribute with the text of Hakim Bey «Temporary Autonomous Zone». You can read it here .