PIZARRO, Esther (2013) :: Catalogue text: Derivas de ciudad, cartografías imposibles
PIZARRO, Esther (2013). “Mobility Maps: Patterning Madrid” (pág. 74-99). Catalogue text: Derivas de ciudad, cartografías imposibles, Centro de Arte Tomás y Valiente (CEART), Edita: Ayuntamiento de Fuenlabrada, CEART. ISBN: 978-84-695-6972-6
Today’s cities are living beings, in constant movement, formed by infinite layers of information where contemporary individuals must build their particular physical space, from which they take the necessary information to generate their mental space, an image of the world that goes beyond what their sensorial environment communicates them. Throughout their lives, individuals go through a variety of settings, different physical and cultural places, endowed with their own features. The possibility of going from one environment to another without “crashing” into the thresholds that separate one from the other, largely depends on the cultural availability of an appropriate concept of space. Technical and scientific development has multiplied the thresholds we must cross: From the space-time of the motorway to the tiny hamlet, from the pedestrian Old Town to the metropolitan network, from airports to the lost island; but the limits become particularly blurred on space-time threshold of a computer screen or Ipad display .
Nowadays, our perceptive itineraries go through a space that is stratified according to the speed of the technical medium employed: We move horizontally on one stratum and vertically between one stratum and another. In this type of perceptive experience, the individual is capable of generating places, although they do not feature a space that is geometrically continuous.
The experience of this stratified, discontinuous and interconnected space, produces new kinds of aggregations. Networks of places are formed perceived to be similar, considered in some way “close”, at least in our perception. In one same perceptive itinerary we can move between points that are physically near, far, or even between virtual points. Individuals in their everyday commuting in the city generate a series of invisible patterns. These patterns hold the memory of their inhabitants, their customs, their desires, their habits, their vices, etc. hidden intrinsically.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their famous book “Mil Mesetas” talk to us about the principle of cartography and calques[1]. The purpose of a calque is to describe a state of fact, the compensation of intersubjective relationships or the exploration of the hidden subconscious in the nooks and crannies of memory and language. Maps, for their part, are in counterpoint to calques, because they take an experimental approach, which acts on what is real. Maps do not reproduce a subconscious that is closed in on itself, but rather they build it. Maps are open, connectable in all their dimensions, dismountable, alterable, susceptible to constantly receiving modifications. They can be broken, altered; they can adapt to different assemblies, commenced by an individual, a group or a social formation. Contrary to calques, a map always has multiple entrances. According to their indications it is necessary to replace the calque on the map to thus commence a rhizome reading of it.
Hence, maps are not only flat; if they were, they would be maps for geographers. Our map is a map full of criss-crossings, a continuous threading of threads, a three-dimension interweaving of lines; only thus will we be capable of representing the fragmentary nature of the city of today, which Manuel Gausa[2], reveals to us broken down into individual components, through all its times, in the heterogeneity of its discontinuities: Open, cartographies, both abstract and at the same time specific; definite and indefinite; precise and evolutive all in one; built of combinable layers of information, conventional data (physical, tactile materials) and others less evident, barely translatable into immaterial variables, almost virtual (flows, energy, scales, processes, etc.); operating data rather than aesthetic images.
Carlos García Vázquez offers a very true vision of today’s city in his essay entitled Ciudad hojaldre. Visiones urbanas del siglo XXI.[3] Throughout his research, the author explains the features and sensitivities that comprise the twelve layers of the ciudad hojaldre or flaky-pastry city: The city of discipline, the planned city, the post-history city, the global city, the dual city, the show city, the sustainable city, the city as nature, the city of bodies, the lived city, the cyber city and the chip city. Of particular relevance is the part devoted to the organicist view of the city why comes to explain the layers of the city as nature, the city of the bodies and the lived city. Contemporary interest in nature leads us to concepts related to chaos and multiplicity. City and complexity are, more than ever, complementary concepts. Under an organicist approach, theorists refocused their research on studying the structures of relative order which are left underlying after situations of apparent chaos; weak structures, changing and flexible, which are probably hidden behind the urban magma and assure its functioning. These groupings are characterised by their lack of any essential structure and a hierarchy of bodies with differentiated functions. Lack of definition, flexible order, permanent mobility, interaction, etc.; would be some of the features of the city of the bodies, a fragile shell, the nodes of which are singular points around which the surrounding space becomes the destination of a multitude of flows that connect it with other singular points in the city. Superposition of lines, of routes, or patterns which weave a network through which urban flows move. The resulting map looks like a rhizome, a kind of burrow, a grid of complex and random pathways, the destination of which is undefined and whose process is open. These authors were interested in the flows and the liquid nature of cities today (Zigmunt Bauman). Thus the modern idea of “movement”, understood as a localised, physical function of the town planners was placed in counterpoint to “motion”, which observed a permanent fluctuation in the city, the juxtaposition of an infinity of material and immaterial flows.
On the other hand, the lived city no longer talks about forms, but rather of sensations, of desires, of memories, of behaviours, etc. At this point, it is essential to consult Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology School; he, who at the beginning of the 20th century began to vindicate the role that our bodily senses played in understanding the environment. This philosophical current understood that the sources of personal knowledge resided in the body (I am my body – Maurice Merleau-Ponty) and through our body and our senses, we know the outside medium. The phenomenological city is intimately tied to the experience the body undergoes and by its movement through the big city. Hence, individuals are able to collaborate in drawing up an intellectual representation of the city through their everyday experiences.
In the textile world, a fabric is defined by the criss-crossing of the weft and the warp. The latter is a set of lengthways yarns which are held tense on a frame or loom and which is differentiated from the yarn that is inserted under and over the warp threads which is called “weft”, “woof” or “filler”. The weft or “woof” is defined by the thread which is drawn laterally through the warp to form the fabric. The weft is a plied yarn comprising several “threads” which is cut to measure before being passed through the warp. In the dressmaking field, a pattern is a template drawn on paper to be copied onto the fabric to thus be able to make a garment, cutting, joining and sewing the different pieces together. Pattern designers usually place a limited number of pieces on one same work sheet, to which they apply colour, line and drawing codes to differentiate sizes and models. The superimposing of all these patterns draws an interesting abstract map formed by the intersection and criss-crossing of lines and colours.
Establishing a parallelism between the textile and the cartographic world, the project Mapas de movilidad: patronando Madrid (Mobility Maps: Patterning Madrid) aims to investigate the routes one hundred anonymous individuals take in their everyday behaviour, generating commuting patterns, a social mapping, a three-dimensional map of public mobility. This behavioural map represents a conceptual resource from which to start the subsequent sculptural formalisation.
To do so, the spatial framework is confined to the central almond of the metropolitan crown of Madrid. In the study of its formal, roadway structure two fundamental layers are defined: The most dense urban framework which is tensioned and acts like the weft of our fabric, and a second later made up of roadways with more mobility within our spatial framework, which represents the warp. The loom is represented by the M-30 ring-road and the 6 national motorways. This spatial framework would be the calque Deleuze talks about , an objective structure which described the planimetry of the city and where any route may be possible. From there, we build the map, a three-dimensional, open, fragmented map; a map traced by the seven hundred routes the one hundred individuals take. A map that does not intend to reproduce, but rather interpret a week in the lives of each of these one hundred people. A lived, experienced cartography, an everyday mapping that by following Deleuze’s advice and superimposing the map on the calque, produces a cartography of driftings, a rhizome of flows, a placing of patterns and behaviours one on top of the next. Those routes are a continuous, open process, with neither beginning nor end, but they could be any others.
[1] DELEUZE, Gilles and GUATTARI, Félix (2000). Mil mesetas. Pre-Textos, Valencia, p. 17-18.
[2] GAUSA, Manuel; DEVESA, Ricardo (2010). Otra mirada. Posiciones contra crónicas. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona, p. 34.
[3] GARCÍA VÁZQUEZ, Carlos (2008). Ciudad hojaldre. Visiones urbanas del siglo XXI. Gustavo Gili, Barcelona.
