Collective identities applied to urban landscape simulation. We’re presenting here three different projects developed for three different urban situations: Cáceres, a historic district turned into a museum; Madrid, a big city thirsty for prestige brands; Cienfuegos [Quirós, Asturias], a rural territory in danger of depopulation due to centralist politics.

Cáceres Creates Cáceres.
You are the protagonist.
A city’s inhabitants are a city’s most valuable heritage.

Cáceres [Spain]. October 2008.

Cáceres has a singular cultural heritage and a unique historic district which is never used by its citizens in an active way: they are bound to go to a big music concert or to a theatre play, because these are the kind of events which are supposed to take place in an urban setting that has renounced to use its space for any activity not suitable for touristic use, and whose buildings have been turned into museums and foundations. Cáceres creates Cáceres turned 2016 images of 2016 Caceres’ citizens into a re-created artificial landscape, an urban intervention made up of images in different formats and scales: real scale figures populating the streets, a mega-citizen protecting the city and merchandising objects (badges, balloons, t-shirts …) that were given out during a participatory event of identity interchange that recovered the historic district of the city as a place were citizens can became actors and not only spectators.

www.cacerescreacaceres.blogspot.com

The Madrilenian of the Year.
A civic prestige brand applied to urban landscape re-generation.
Madrid. September 2010.

“During The White Night 2010 thousands of Madrilenians became Alberto Santander, Madrilenian of the Year, an anonymous citizen that turned into the protagonist image of the city for one night through the presence of thousands of doubles of himself, a masked crowd that changed Madrid’s urban landscape”. The idea of “turning” an anonymous and individual citizen into a protagonist that represents a whole city derives from some already tested formats such as people’s choice awards and participative urban dynamics, as well as contemporary social traumas such as the fifteen minutes of fame predicted by Andy Warhol or the adoration of imaginary characters.
The quest for the “Madrilenian of the Year” is not an attempt to generate a summary of identities, a partisan average, a standard size or a model, but to make an anecdotic citizen become the representative image of the identity of the city of Madrid. We are not looking for another fictitious image of superiority (whether it is an Olympic hand or a Cultural event) to represent us, but a real person with a concrete identity: Alberto Santander Martínez.

www.elmadrileñodelaño.com

Plan E[xtinction]
Rural dissapearing identity project.
Cienfuegos [Asturias, Spain]. December 2010.

Plan E[xtinction] is a project that searches to link the collective identity of endangered Asturian settlements with that of their surviving inhabitants as a way to stand out depopulation processes, turning the image of these citizens into the representative image of this phenomenon. A pilot project of Plan E[xtintion] took place in Cienfuegos [Asturias],(a rural settlement were only 10 people still live permanently) all of the inhabitants were reunited in an emblematic spot and a collective portrait of them was taken. This photography has become the symbolic entrance of the village (as it happens with the Osborne Bull or the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas entrance sign) by reusing an obsolete PlanE sign (The Spanish Economy and Employment Stimulus Plan) formerly used in Gijón, a city were many of Cienfuegos’ inhabitants moved to live in, as a way to claim for the importance of the people living in these settlements bounded to disappear.

www.planextincion.blogspot.com

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