Project Briefing

This is a temporal entry in English describing our latest exhibition, while we translate the whole of our documents.

What you will get here is a synthesis, a general explanation of the project, and how it is portrayed at a specific place.

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Nerivela collective

 

MUMO

Second Approach: La Merced

 

MUMO, Molecular Urban Model Offline, is a program that accompanies self-management processes performed by urban neighborhoods engaged in shaping the city through their own projects. MUMO —developed by the Nerivela Collective— reflects on the relations within the community, fosters the discussion about decision-making tools, suggests collaborative designs to make a specific community’s concerns visible and makes new qualitative values available for study.

MUMO is a device that involves processes. Therefore, rather than reporting results, this exhibition unleashes a field of action to prompt new links and experiences. It is also a space in which certain affective indexes of participation are shown, along with the display of apparently simple objects, yet loaded with a special significance —at times identitary, historic, affective, imaginary or projected— for the community. La Merced is the second neighborhood with which Nerivela works following this model, of interest for Ex-Teresa due to its vicinity and particularly —as the Nerivela Collective notes— given “its plurality and its polyphonies, due to its self-sufficiency and its production of identity, La Merced is a city in itself, a city contained within a wider urban system, with which there are connections and mutual dependencies.”

Ex-Teresa supports this device of affective articulations as a cultural institution, a symbolic space that allows to project and signify this sort of experimental practices on own and foreign circuits. Also, there is another meaningful factor for which MUMO takes place in this venue: the unfolding of the concept of a “social sculpture.” The exhibition of these collaborations in an institutional art space is not gratuitous: it is precisely in a place of this nature in which the results of the social practice called “art” have been shown, a concept rarely understood as an index of processes that shape —both physically and psychologically, as well as emotionally— a society’s structure. The concept of a “social sculpture,” suggested by Joseph Beuys, allows an examination and discussion of what may be understood as “art,” but mostly indicates which are the fields of action and the subjectivities that cast the possibility and scope of such a concept.

The exhibition is complemented with talks between tenants and specialists on several topics under the title Barter City: practices, tactics and urban devices, dynamics that retrieve information from the neighborhood, reactivate social practices and prompt the collaborative construction of sculptures, installations and artifacts, in order to approach from several perspectives a lively and quite diverse territory.

Sofía Carrillo