Roulotte:09. This is not a museum. Mobile devices lurking

Roulotte:09 is a special issue which brings to a close the project Ceci n’est pas une voiture. Mobile devices stalking museums. This adventure has been conducted over the last three years in different stages and which now culminates in the publication of what has occurred throughout this long journey. The general project’s most visible point consisted of holding an exhibition entitled This is not a museum. Mobile devices lurking which was pre-sented in ACVic in October 2011 and is scheduled to tour the Balkans in 2012 organized by Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).

Roulotte:09 comprises all the material presented in the exhibition as well as the reflections discussed at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía which sought to construct a body of theory able to go together with the whole of the project. This issue is not just a mere witness of an exhibition but acts rather like a specific episode of a project focused on research regarding the numerous mobile artefacts that are in use in various cities around the world acting like devices for a vast array of artistic practices.

ACVic Centre d’Arts Contemporànies, Acción Cultural Española (AC/E), Can Xalant Centre de Creació i Pensament Contemporani de Mataró and Idensitat with the collaboration of Trànsit Projectes.

(December 2011)

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Roulotte:08
COLONIALISMS / COLONIALISMES / COLONIALISMOS

Roulotte’s latest wanderings provide a journey through supposedly decolonized territories which, however, continue to suffer absolute lack of interest other than a clear economic reconquest based on the arrogance of the West. No lawful exorcism capable of shaking up the colonial ghost is possible as long as there are no clear policies regarding reparations; any other way out is just a new plan to obtain literary material. Until this becomes effective it is absolutely essential to go back to the scene of the events to accomplish a double aim: acknowledge the ruins caused in the laboratory of modernity and test new ways of listening to local versions.

In the first option seen from this double perspective, the projects by Pep Dardanyà and Ângela Ferreira in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in Niger and the Congo respectively, must be interpreted. The work by Andrea Geyer on indigenous communities in North America may also be conceived as a perfect example of this attention paid to local psyches silenced by colonial violence. Between these two extremes, Marion von Osten delves into the complexities of negotiating between modernism’s evangelization and the liberation movements in Casablanca, so close to the infamous Spanish example of lax post-colonialism in Western Sahara now remembered in an essay by Xavier Arenós. In any case, on this journey Roulotte detects how too many voices still plan domination that is capable of adapting to new formats. Perhaps the exotic portrayal of the Papuan Islands cannot be repeated to swell the notion of a Germanic homeland –as reproduced in the work by Fernando Bryce– but solvent metropolises still consider in their political agendas old colonies as lands that are up for sale.

(December 2010)

Rogelio López Cuenca, a77 + Pau Faus, Ximena Labra, Heidrun Holzfeind, Erkan Özgen, Ana Teresa Ortega, Javier Peñafiel.

Roulotte:07

Following the two previous special issues (# 05, # 06) Roulotte returns to its usual ways, with barely a route planned other than the attentive readiness to stop wherever interesting projects are sighted. Perhaps the reference made to portable architecture and self-construction offered by a77 may even be interpreted as a way of explaining this return to the unpredictability of the road. However, as happens in all experiments, once consummated we then suffer the temptation of interpreting the discontinuity of events as if they were fragments of a single story. This is how we have now decided to provide a common thread which passes through most of the projects in Roloutte 07: the memory.

In recent years contemporary culture has been used in projects of anamnesis in a clearly visible way. The reason for this turn of events is complex in character, but may be summed up in two ideas. First there is an obvious lack of instruments by which to consider the future after modern illusions about it were shattered; it seems there is no utopian horizon possible in this vacuum without feeding on past stories which nowadays may be brought up to date. Conversely, the magnitude of contemporary hedonism has placed us within a rigorous dictatorship of the present where, together with the effervescent proliferation of situations, grows proportionally with the feeling of rampant banality – that of dispensable biographies– which can only be corrected by fearless archaeology.

(April 2010)

(July 2009)
Presentation of Roulotte:05 (ACM) and the publication entitled Rotorrr, within the context of the After Architecture exhibition.
Arts Santa Mònica

Roulotte:05
MAKAN · MAKOM · PLACE · LLOC · LUGAR > ISRAEL / PALESTINE

The hostilities or the conflict are just two of the euphemisms used by the traditional media when referring to the constant harassment, either military or legal, carried out by the state of Israel on Palestinians. When this special issue of Roulotte was about to go into press a severe punishment operation was being carried out on the Gaza Strip –a much more explicit expression and thus reserved for acts of war– with the most shameful international acquiescence. This situation dates back to when the state of the Land of Israel was created, thus beginning a policy of usurpation, division and fragmenting of the territory and people of Palestine. From this moment on, the remorse felt by the West for the Holocaust allowed a new breach to open up which has led to thousands being displaced and made refugees, in continuous illegal settlements, in an suffocating administrative blockade upon the people and the building of gigantic illegal walls. In a clearly eloquent way, the Israeli celebration of Independence Day coincides with the Nakba (misfortune) of Palestine.

This territory is the reason for the dispute and the axis on which the zone’s political agenda hangs. Each inch of ground is fought over with all sorts of religious rhetoric, administrative strategies and acts of war. The Promised Land turned into the empire of irrationality, of vigilance and unpunished violence. The Place (Makom in Hebrew and Makan in Arabic) seems to be stigmatised by the irresolvable ethnic separation into two states. The old agreements which led to the division being established by the by the Green Line have not been respected and the territorial planning by the state of Israel is still conceived as an ongoing greedy process regardless of the consequences which it may bring. In this issue Roulotte proposes a collection of works which inspect the tensions affecting this damaged and fragmented territory through different registers, without failing to add proposals for the necessary future.

roulotte:05
The Monster’s tail. Ariella Azoulay / Adi Ophir
Walls / Shelters / Holes. Miki Kratsman
Street Exhibitions. Activestills
Real Estate. Domènec
48_Nakba. Domènec / Sàgar Malé / Mapasonor
In the Absence of a Currency. Shuruq Harb
Decolonizing Architecture. Sandi Hilal / Alessandro Petti / Eyal Weizman
Zion. Kertesz / Maor
Baggage Roulotte: 05. Jan Tichy

10 June 2009, presentation of the special collectively published issue of “Roulotte:06 / Spam_magazine 6”, Centro cultural Matucana 100, Santiago, Chile.
Taking part: Pablo Brugnoli, Gregorio Brugnoli, Domènec and Marti Peran
With the support of Centro Cultural de España Santiago de Chile and SEACEX

……………….

Roulotte:06
SPECIAL ISSUE > ROULOTTE / SPAM_MAGAZINE > AMERICA / EUROPE

The remarkable trajectories of SPAM_magazine and Roulotte have now come together. This volume is in fact the result of combining two different projects to achieve a common goal. This event happened quite by chance coinciding with both publications reaching the same number of issues (6); so, without changing any sequences, each publication celebrates the opportunity to continue its work by conferring absolute naturalness upon this chance meeting.

The different continents covered in each publication raise hardly any divergence. With their own trajectories already made and despite their distant origins, Roulotte and SPAM_magazine have demonstrated they have very close interests and even a certain similarity in styles. Santiago de Chile and Barcelona have hardly any tools by which to channel mutual information, but the flexible portable nature of both publications has enabled them to become uprooted enough to meet in new places. You will find a small collection of these enclaves herein.

While considering the joint project the teams at SPAM_magazine and Roulotte decided to conduct crossed perspectives. Thus the Roulotte team offers several works carried out on the American continent while SPAM_magazine does the same with Europe. This is simply a methodological tool of leisure lacking any anthropological pretensions. Both projects travel anywhere and everywhere, so it would be quite impertinent to grant them any privilege in defining their viewpoints. Yet a common plot has been activated which runs through all the projects: their cartographical character.

Cartography has been a fundamental tool for an alleged scientific approach to physical and social territories, but at the same time it has also amounted to a certain kind of protocol to create the same area it represents and to manage all regimes of visible and invisible things a la carte. Faced with this tradition, contemporary culture has tested other cartographic procedures, other ways of noting geographical and political scenarios in which there is a resurgence of improvised restless worlds. You won’t find any conventional maps in this volume, yet one way or another all the contents form the fragment of a possible infinite mapping.

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(April 2008)

Roulotte is a flexible editorial project produced by ACM, Associació per a la Cultura i l’Art Contemporani which features information on projects devised in specific geographical and social contexts. Roulotte thus becomes a sort of permanently travelling mobile exhibition. Editors: Xavier Arenós, Domènec, Martí Peran.

Event featuring the participation of Jordi Colomer and Josep M. Martín.

From 21 through 25 April 2008 the Roulotte archive may be visited at Nivell Zero with photography by Lisbeth Salas.